Letters from Baron Friedrich von Hügel to a niece [microform]

UNIVERSITY

OF CHICAGO

v LIBRARY >

Prom tfo Library of
ELINOR CASTLE NEF

and
JOHN U. NEF

BARON FRIEDRICH VON HUGEL'S
LETTERS TO A NIECE

LETTERS

FROM BARON FRIEDRICH
VON HU GEL TO A NIECE

Edited with an Introduction by

GWENDOLEN GREENE

LONDON &f TORONTO
J. M. DENT & SONS LTD.

All rights reserved

'X

r-

FIRST PUBLISHED IN THIS EDITION . 1928
REPRINTED 1929

UNIVfJVSJTY

OF CHICAGO

LIBRARY

Gitt of
John U. Nel

PRINTED

GREAT BRITAIN

Lc monde voit en elle les passions, 1'interet, 1'ambition; il voit
1'eau amere qui remplit les choses; et nous, nous cherchons sous
les eaux ameres cette petite source Arethuse qui continue sa
course, cette petite suite de la grace, plus profonde, plus cachee.
mais qui existe pourtant.

ABBE HUVELIN, Quelques Directeurs d'Ames.

I know that thou canst do every thing . . . Therefore have I
uttered that I understood not; things too wonderful for me.
which I knew not. ... I have heard of thee by the hearing of
the ear : but now mine eye seeth thee.

Jobxlii.

Through such souls alone
God stooping shows sufficient of His light
For us i* the dark to rise by.
And I rise.

ROBERT BROWNING, " Pompilia," The Ring and the Book.

INTRODUCTION

SOME of these letters have been published already in
the Selected Letters of Friedrich von Htigel, others have
not yet appeared in print. They are now collected
and issued separately for those people to whom the
larger book may be a difficulty the people who are
not interested in the more directly philosophical and
theological sides of religion. Perhaps they have not
the capacity, or the training; their way is more humble
and they want to learn. They are like the simple
people in the old hymn who say:

I thirst for springs of heavenly life,

And here all day they rise ;
I seek the treasure of Thy love,

And close at hand it lies. 1

They can say "I seek," but they do not know how
to find; they hardly think that they can find. For to
them religion is like the jewel in the toad's head it
is a fable something unreal and apart from life. God
if he exists is too far away, he might as well not be
there at all; and Christ and the Saints belong to
another age. Living realities once, startling and filling
their world, they have no significance now, and hardly
enter our thoughts. Ages ago they lived and died,
suffered and were adored. Those things are not now,
and no living soul can inhabit a church.

For many life becomes half-toned and pointless:

1 From "My heart is resting, O my God." Anna Waring.

vii

viii Introduction

all that they do disappointing and dim. The deepest
things have lost their dignity, there is no value in
anything in life. Their little bits of faith, of hope and
love are fruitless, all disconnected like the beads of
a broken necklace that lie scattered over the ground.
There seems no way to connect them, no power to
make them of worth. But my uncle knows how to
connect them, he produces what restores them to
life. He gathers these beads together with untiring
love and care. He patiently searches and gathers
them from wherever they may lie hidden, and he
threads them on to their proper chain, the chain
that unites us to God. For out of all our doings and
cares, our hopes and fears, and loves, he makes a little
home where the Spirit of Christ can dwell, and where,
united to God by prayer, our souls can live and expand.

He "preaches Jesus." And when he tells us of God
his face is lit and illumined by some interior fire. He
speaks like a prophet. He burns with his message
what he sees, he makes us see. As before some tremen-
dous catastrophe, some sublime grief or love, we are
drawn into an awe and a worship of God we can
never escape or forget.

When he speaks of Our Lord and his Church and
the Saints, he reveals these for us. They emerge as
realities greater than any, obliterating all we have
known. They obliterate all yes but only to renew,
re-create, and instil in our souls that love that he
knows: a love deeper and closer than any, within
and without us, enfolding, inspiring our lives.

"To sanctify is the biggest thing out." These words
of his ring in my mind. They express what he was,

Introduction ix

what he meant, what he wished most to do. His whole
life lies in them. He tried to find truth, to teach us
God, to sanctify our lives. He loved, and he wanted
to teach us to love. Can one soul communicate love
to another?

I am adding to these letters the conversations that
I had with my uncle during the same period of time.
(Much, I am afraid, has been forgotten, though the
impression remains.) They express the same desire,
they have the same aim. He wanted, as he says some-
where, to train me "in faith, trust and love of God,
Christ and the Church." They help fill in to some
extent the picture that I would like to give of him.
It is a double picture, a picture of him teaching, and
a picture of what he taught.

He told me often, how one trained soul could teach
another, one soul radiate light to another soul, one
saint make another saint. "That is the great tradi-
tion I never learnt anything myself by my own
old nose." So here we can try, through these let-
ters and talks, to learn what he learnt; and to love
and to follow the way that he loved and lived for
so many years.

I cannot attempt to describe my uncle. Many can
do that so much better than I. I am dominated and
absorbed by his greatness. He seems to me as rich
and large as the world. I am lost in his depth, silenced
by his nobility. I remember his words to me about
great things: "Be silent about great things; let them
grow inside you. Never discuss them: discussion is so
limiting and distracting. It makes things grow smaller.
You think you swallow things when they ought to

x Introduction

swallow you. Before all greatness, be silent in art,
in music, in religion: silence." And so before him
I must be silent, and let him speak for himself.

"I want to make the most of whatever light people
have got, however slight it may be, to strengthen and
deepen whatever they already possess, if I can." He
dreaded to strain or complicate people, to mix up
their "attraits" for them.

"Leave out all that does not help you. Take only
what you can, and what helps. Wipe your feet on my
old hair, if it will help you, my little old thing," was
one of his first injunctions to me. And "Our Lord
tells us not to put out the smoking flax, not to break
the bruised reed and yet I always see this. God
makes lovely little flowers grow everywhere, but some-
one always comes and sits on them." He could not
help it if people were impressed by his way, and his
mind, but he never wanted to make people grow into
his own mould.

When I look at the notes of his talks (very fragmen-
tary, and only made after they occurred) I am bewil-
dered by the amount of things he talked about.
Discriminations on people, things, books, histories,
movements, besides actual religion and direction of
life. He touched on nearly everything, and it is
impossible to publish all this here: I am obliged to
make a selection. Then there are all his jokes and
stories, his most curious adjectives and slang words;
so peculiarly suitable to the things and people he
describes, and so extremely characteristic one loves
them almost best of all.

How well I remember the "whole-hoggers" and the
"lumpers," the "meansters" and "fusty" people,

Introduction xi

whom he could not stand; and the people who asked
him the same question thirty times. "I cannot make
them out at all," he used to say with a very bewildered
face. "They are like flying beetles, first they bump
into your eye, then into your boot." The people whose
minds were like slop-basins and those "who water
broomsticks to grow roses" tried him very much; and
lastly he used to speak wistfully of those "who can't
swallow one potato, but try to swallow eight!" "My
old boot" was a very favourite expression. "Rashdall
has as much mysticism in him as my old boot."
Throwing his old boot, or both his old boots, or "all
my old boots" at the young Anglican clergy seemed
one of his most favourite pastimes. He used to laugh
tremendously over his own jokes.

It was not till 1919 that he began his regular talks
with me. I sat beside him, always on the same little
low chair (just as we always had to keep to the same
day, if possible it had some tremendous significance!).
I always felt like a child with my uncle, and I never
attempted to be anything else. As he said, I had to
learn, and I am still in a spiritual childhood. Every-
thing was carefully prepared before my arrival. He
liked me best to knit while I listened. He said
people always listened best when they did some-
thing with their hands, more especially women.
His plan was all thought out : he wanted to try
and strengthen my character, feed my soul : and
I was to learn through history, as well as through
religion itself. "I want to prepare you, to organise
you for life, for illness, crisis, and death"; and the
essence of his first as of his last talk might be said in
his own words: "Live all you can as complete and

xii Introduction

full a life as you can find do as much as you can for
others. Read, work, enjoy love and help as many
souls do all this. Yes but remember: Be alone, be
remote, be away from the world, be desolate. Then
you will be near God!"

I must often have disappointed him. He was so
humble, he thought everyone could remember, under-
stand, and discriminate, as he did himself. But if he
was disappointed, he never showed it. He went on
with his teaching with a beaming face. He said it
was clearly my duty to read "to do a great amount
of reading, not to become a learned woman. A learned
woman is an abomination, there is nothing to be done
but to drown her. No not to be a spectacled blue-
stocking, but to be a deeply spiritual woman. I want
to feed your mind and soul; to make you a sober,
persevering, balanced, genial, historical Christian."

So we began by reading history, pagan history, and
first of all Boissier's Histoire du Paganisms, then more
Boissiers; then Caesar, Cicero, Lucretius, Virgil,
Tacitus, Horace, Livy, Pliny, Herodotus, Hesiod,
Thucydides. The parcels came regularly, like books
from a library, all carefully selected and chosen to
suit my state, and always accompanied by a letter
explaining their particular value or beauty. When
we at last reached Christian things, we began with
St. Augustine (which he read aloud to me, the most
wonderful reading, in the garden at Clonboy, Engle-
field Green); the martyrs, Tertullian ("that great
fierce African genius"), Jerome. The Fathers in the
Desert, Minucius Felix, etc. Many were presents,
selected translations, because I could not read Latin.
When we got to Greek books, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus,

Introduction xiii

he gave me also guide-books on Greek statuary, and
books on coins in the British Museum.

How I wish I could have it all over again, for
perhaps I should understand and remember a little
more! We were just starting on Indian religions with
Farquhar's Crown of Hinduism at the time of his
death. We went through all the English poets, from
Casdmon to Browning. He loved Brownirig^very much,
and used to read him too aloud to me in the garden
at Clonboy. But he was always distressed at Browning's
appearing to think it was almost a necessity to commit
some great sin in order to become ultimately a saint.
"That's all wrong. I don't like that. We are not all
St. Augustines. We should stay down in the mud and
the mire. Even St. Augustine would have been a
greater saint had he been innocent: magnificent, the
Church canonising him!"

He never gave me any purely clever books; he could
not bear them. "We never really get anything that
way. Clever people never think. They are incapable
of thinking I have always found this so. Cleverness
never goes with depth and real thinking." I never
can forget his indignation when someone wanted me
to read Locke and Hume. "Why should you, a living
woman, read Locke or Hume? Can grammar alone
feed the human soul? Locke is a dreary old man;
he may have a God, but he is a dusty dim God. And
Hume is blase. He is the sort of person young people
are taken in by: they take him for something else. He
knows everything. He got to the bottom of everything
by the time he was sixteen: he sees everything through
clear glass windows. If I were to die to-night, he would
know all about me by to-morrow. These old bones

xiv Introduction

would be all arranged, sorted out, explained and in
his coat-pocket; but somehow he would not have got
me all the same." He never gave me any directly
mystical books, except Mother Julian and Dr. Baker,
both of whom he loved much.

In the earliest notes I made he speaks a great deal
of the need to know history not only religious
history but all history, especially for a religious
woman. "A religious woman is often so tiresome,
so unbalanced and excessive. She bores everyone,
she has no historical sense. I want to teach you
through history. History is an enlargement of per-
sonal experience, history pressing the past. We must
have the closest contact with the past. How poor
and thin a thing is all purely personal religion! Is
there any such thing as a purely original thinker?
You must get a larger experience you gain it by
a study of history; the individualistic basis simply
doesn't work.

"I hate all the notion that there is no value in
anything that is past that the only value is in what
we have got now. That cuts us right off, it gives us
no base, it leaves out the richness and soundness of
the great traditions. I want to teach you through all
those gigantic things, the martyrs, gnosticism, scep-
ticism, ifchat_aJxQciqus thing the eighteenth century.
I want you to learn about the great souls that lived
through all those tracts of time. You will learn about
progress. People talk so much about progress now-
adays. Where is all this wonderful progress in the
human soul? Religion to be deep and rich must be
historical. I can't help it if you don't believe in
religion, it's an historical fact. It is to demonstrate

Introduction xv

and to explain its growth that Tiele wrote the book
you liked so much. x Tiele's style is not elegant polished
English, but he is full of stuff. It is the stuff of religion
that matters. We will not idolise form; it is the rich-
ness of the content that counts. The New Testament
what is it in form? It is nothing it is not even
literature but it is the bread of life. About knowledge
so many people want to know, in order to know,
and nothing else. How empty all that is! What a
difference in Christianity!

"Christianity is a thing of the heart, and it's that
that matters. No other knowledge counts but that
that feeds and strengthens the mind and soul. The
spiritual world is a great world of facts, and you must
learn about it, as you would learn forestry from the
forester. After five or six years among the trees you
will know something about them. You are a goose if
you cavil at that! I learnt all that I know from 1
Huvelin. What I teach you is him, not me. I learnt j
it from him. What a great saint he was! and what )
he taught me! c One torch lights another torch ' /
(Lucretius) . One penitent soul awakens to the desire
to teach other souls in sufferings and dryness a more
experienced soul can sustain the less. It is best to,
learn from others; it gives a touch of creatureliness.
I don't know if that is a real word or not, but it is
almost my favourite adjective. Your ultimate light
is your o^/n; but in the meantime you have got
to learn.

"Suffering is the greatest teacher; the consecrated
suffering of one soul teaches another. I think we have
got all our values wrong, and suffering is the crown

1 Tide, Scientific History of Religion.

xvi Introduction

of life. Suffering and expansion, what a rich com-
bination!

"Religion has never made me happy; it's no use
shutting your eyes to the fact that the deeper you go,
the more alone you will find yourself. Suffering can
expand, it can contract. La soujfrance noble, la soujfrance
Basse. Grasp the nettle, my little old thing! Religion
has never made me comfy. I have been in the deserts
ten years. All deepened life is deepened suffering,
deepened dreariness, deepened joy. Suffering and joy.
The final note of religion is joy.

"Do not be greedy of consolation. I never got
anything that way. Suffering teaches: life teaches.
Don't weaken love; never violate it. Love and joy
are your way. Be very humble, it's the only thing.
That is why I try to keep my little thing always on
her knees.

"Dullness, dreariness and loneliness. East winds
always blowing; desolation, with certain lucid in-
tervals and dim assurances. Be always faithful. You
will find you would rather lose life itself than this
life. Apres tout, the last act in life is devotion devotion
in death. I like that.

"Religion is dim in the religious temper there
should be a great simplicity, and a certain content-
ment in dimness. It is a great gift of God to have
this temper. God does not make our lives all ship-
shape, clear and comfortable. Never try to get things
too clear. Religion can't be clear. In this mixed-up
life there is always an element of unclearness. I believe
God wills it so. There is always an element of tragedy.
How can it be otherwise if Christianity is our ideal?
When I was a young man I was always interested in

Introduction xvii

religion, in the facts of religion, and I felt these facts
to be outside of myself, not my imagination. As far
as I can see them, they are quite beyond my imagina-
tion. If I could understand religion as I understand
that two and two make four, it would not be worth
understanding. Religion can't be clear if it is worth
having. To me, if I can see things through and through,
I get uneasy I feel it's a fake. I know I have left
something out, I've made some mistake.

"You want to be truthful to find the truth, to be
truthful to find God. We can't eliminate all difficulties.
Some people don't want the truth. They get in the
train, but they won't go all the way: they get out in
a potato-field. These people make scepticism; they so-
phisticate the mind. We are like sponges trying to mop
up the ocean. We can never know God exhaustively.
God is simultaneous, totum simul: we are passing. How
splendidly the Roman Church has got that the
time-limited and the timeless! We can never picture
God or imagine him. Either we make him too small,
and we strain at that,, or we make him too big, and
he strains us. Let us rest content. We have not got to
invent God, nor to hold him. He holds us. We shall \
never be able to explain God, though we can appre- '
hend him, more and more through the spiritual life.
I want you to hold very clearly the otherness of God,
and the littleness of men. If you don't get that you
can't have adoration, and you cannot have religion
without adoration.

"I can't bear those people who talk about God
and us as mutualities. God and us little men! Man
the centre, and God coming to himself through us
men! I know more and more how small I am, how

xviii Introduction

great God is. He works in us, not by us. We shall
never be God, we shall always be men. He gives:
we receive. The given-ness of God everything is
given. The moderns say: 'Thank goodness we have
got rid of the awful position of servant and master*
(is it awful?). God needs us, as much as we need

him. Canon S says God needs us to make the

world. I must say I never heard Canon S helped

God to make Saturn's rings! It sounds rather fusty
somehow to me.

"How vulgar the eighteenth century was: a purely
fAw-world affair. God and the other world went out
completely. But though you can throw God out of
man's life, he always manages to get back again.
Man is both of, and not of, this world; the soul lives
in two worlds hence the tension. How splendidly
Kant saw that! God is the great reality that penetrates
our lives: the practice and presence of God there,
get that.

" Some people are so fond of ideas. A new idea is
a kind of magic to them! I don't care about ideas,
I want facts. God is not an idea. He is a fact. 'I find
God outside of myself. He is an illapse from outside.'
There, that is right, that does away with all this
miserable subjectivism. I don't much like all this
Coue* business, all this dwelling on ourselves. Leave
ourselves let in God. I always think it is much
harder for a healthy person to be really religious, to
find God. When your body is a constant failure you
cannot depend on yourself at all, so you turn to God.
If you love God, and hate yourself, that's all right.
We are becoming creatures becoming in order to
be God is. We are getting to being. Religion is not

Introduction xix

man-made: it is immense: it comes from outside.
Man rather spoils it, but in spite of all he can do, it
remains immortal. The supernatural life is a life of
renunciation. If we are Christians there are always
two notes, suffering and joy. Gethsemane is awful,
but it does not end with Gethsemane; there is the
Resurrection. We want the whole of religion; renun-
ciation and joy, the Gross and the Grown. I don't
like Christians who have concentrated only on the
Gross: Christianity is the whole life of Christ. His life
of mortification, of suffering and sacrifice, culminating,
it is true, in the Cross. But I can't bear the obliterating
of his life, that great life lived, the touching humility
and love. And the parables look at the inexhaustible
wonder of the parables, how beautiful they are! I like
a balanced Christianity: Christianity is so balanced.

"What a wretched affair the eighteenth century!
I often think of Herbert Spencer, picking up and
reading Plato at the Club. His surprised, contemptuous
admiration. 1 Spencer was a flea or a bug compared
to Plato. The eighteenth-century ideal was the smug,
comfy, utterly material domestic life. Is that the final
end of man in Christianity? the decent, comfortable
married man? No. No. Christianity is not that. The
whole world would reject that: no primitive Christian
would look at it for a moment. Christianity is a
heroism. People seem sometimes to think it is a dear
darling, not-to-be-grumpy, not-to-be-impatient, not-
to-be-violent life; a sort of wishy-washy sentimental
affair. Stuff and nonsense! Christianity is not that.
Christianity is an immense warning; a tremendous

1 Spencer was, of course, nineteenth-century, but perhaps my uncle
meant he was a type of the eighteenth-century spirit.

xx Introduction

heroism. Christ teaches a great austerity. He teaches
renunciation: the life of the Gross. He was not
comfy. He had not where to lay his head. He was
no rigorist, yet he tells us to die to ourselves, to take
up the Gross, to follow him. Is that all comfy? Chris-
tianity is coming back to renunciation, and to a
right asceticism and austerity. That is what Our
Lord teaches. If you don't see that in the Gospels,
I don't see what you see.

"It's like fear. Fear went out altogether. It was an
invention of priests. 'Perfect love casteth out fear.' But
does it? You cannot build on one text like that. In
ah* love there is an element of fear; an unabashed
human being is a horrible thing. Fear is not always
servile. Awe and reverence, they are fear purified and
spiritualised. Fear is inseparable from love. That's
jolly. Fear spiritualised is in all adoration. Religion
without adoration is like a triangle with one side
left out.

"I hope you will never become scrupulous. It is a
bad thing all round, a morbid conscientiousness and
brooding. Never brood, brooding is a waste of growth.
How I have found this myself! It puts back all my
work if I brood. Die without a breath of grievance:
religion makes this possible, men have less the spirit
of grievance.

"Drop things; always keep on dropping and
dropping. My religion, my illness, suffering and
life have taught me that. Always drop things. Don't
chatter to yourself you can't hear God if you do.
We need not try to conceive God: he attends to all
that. We have to make room for him in our souls.
There was no room for Our Lord, you remember, at

Introduction xxi

the inn. In this world, too, there is no room for him.
Drop, then, all these things, these miseries: not by
straining, or making or getting strength; but genially,
gently; while attending, as you must, to these things,
drop them; these flies that bother your nose, God
nowhere visible. Resign yourself. That is God's plan
faithfully, wisely, resign yourself. Fussiness and
activity! What a difference there is between action
and activity (Aristotle, God is action) ! People waste
their lives in these countless little activities and
fussinesses. When I get up feeling I have a hundred
things to do then I know it's all wrong. I try to get
away, to go for a walk with Puck. I leave everything
till I am better. I would like you to learn from
St. Catherine of Genoa the point of always attending to
but one thing at a time. This one action or suffering, ',
joy or renunciation, being at that moment the one \
will of God and the one means of pleasing him and i
of attaining true growth in oneself. It is the trait '
d'union with God. The more full and varied your i
life becomes, the more this great principle and prac- ;
tice is necessary to prevent distraction and racket.;
Goethe's mother, when she was dying, sent down a
message to a caller that she could not see her as she
was occupied in dying. C I am busy with death.' That's
right so I hope too to turn to death, busy with that,
one thing at a time. My own experience now when
my life is twenty times as full as it was at eighteen,
yet it is much more unified and recollected. The great
rule is, Variety up to the verge of dissipation : Recollection \
up to the verge of emptiness : each alternating with the }
other and making a rich fruitful tension. Thus we
gather honey from all sorts of flowers, then sort out,

xxii Introduction

arrange, unify and store, the honey gathered. After
which we again fly out on our honey-gathering expe-
ditions. What an immense activity was Fenelon's: and
a still larger activity St. Augustine's! Yet both were
deeply recollected men.

"Young people seem absorbed nowadays in getting
their own way. Matthew Arnold says you can get so
absorbed in heroism that that becomes your own way.
But you can't have growth if you do what you like as
we ordinarily mean it, until we come again to live
for duty and not for rights, to be busy with contrition
for sin and not with comforts. God is in duty. The
notion of being comfortable! How vulgar it is! God
never makes our lives comfortable. Even in heaven
I believe there will be an equivalent of suffering
not as it stands here but the equivalent, suffering
beatified. I feel sure of this.

"How curiously uncertain and uncomfortable people
are in Protestantism! It is the Calvinism in it, the
curious betwixt - and - between - ness. Protestants are
pledged to two mutually contradictory movements.
The reforming spirit of Erasmus and More was
splendid but the strongly Calvinistic Protestant spirit
is so narrow and thin.

"The suppression and illegality of the crucifix in
England is the result of Calvinism. It is like image-
breaking. Preposterous! There is nothing more beau-
tiful than the crucifix. Luther had no objection to
the crucifix the Lutheran dies with it in his hand.
The cross is Protestant, and the crucifix Roman. The
Protestant Church contains in Anglicanism many
precious commitments of Catholicism, but it is a
compromise between Calvinism and Calvinism's bete

bitroduction xxiii

noire the Roman Catholic Church. I love the Book
of Common Prayer all except the Homilies and the
Thirty-nine Articles. I would like to wring the necks
of both of those.

" I hate rigorism it's all wrong. Our Lord was never
a rigorist. He loved publicans and sinners. How he
loved all the beauties of nature, the family children!
His parables are full of these homely things. God
nearly always teaches us through a person, he teaches
us through individuals. Follow his lead. Live from
day to day, even from hour to hour. I want you to
learn to die to yourself daily; the daily death is a
spiritual habit. You want heroism and renunciation
more, you want wisdom and discipline: organise
yourself. Perseverance is one of the crowning graces
of God. Get rid of all self-occupation. I don't mean
self-examination for conscience' sake, though that,
too, can be overdone. But self-oblivion is a splendid
thing; move out of yourself, let in God. Never pray
but you realise that you are but one of a countless
number of souls, a countless number of stars.

"Do not suppress pleasures, but let them flop.
Pleasure is like the fringe of your dress, the afterness
of an act. Ignore them, let them flop, never work
directly for them.

"God always gives joy, even in spiritual things
there is a concomitant pleasure. There is a great
joy in renunciation. I just love the monkish conception,
it is the protest against the too much caring for the
world. There are two poles within the Church the
heroic monastic, and the homely domestic pole. The
pole of renouncing the monk; and the domestic pole
the married people who go whole into things. We

xxiv Introduction

need them both to make Christianity and the Church

very wide, very deep and inclusive. The Roman

Catholic Church proclaims them both as necessities,

and both from God. She has never let go the monk

without him, what an impoverishment! When I was

young and tempted to fall into sin, no old woman

with a tract could have saved me. But I came across

a Dominican monk. What a splendid man he was!

What I learnt from him! He saved me from sin. I

remember he said to me once, 'You think I do all

this for pleasure? for show? Give up marriage, live

in discomfort and cold, eat fish all the year round,

that I do it to please myself? I don't, I hate it, but

I do it for God. I do it to keep alive in this world the

spirit that the world forgets the spirit of renunciation,

sacrifice, the supernatural life.' The body is the servant

of the spirit. I think of Huvelin; look at him! What a

great saint he was! What tremendous mortifications

he went in for! All saints are excessive to start. He was

a man of tremendous passion, tremendous intensity.

And what wonderful gentleness and moderation he

attained to! What patience! All that was the result

of his self-discipline and excessive yes, no doubt

excessive mortifications. No doubt he ruined his

health but what would you have? He did not

despise passion, he sacrificed it. No Protestant can

understand that; they are too stupid! But he became

a saint. No man was more tolerant of others; always

suffering and ill, he sat in a chair radiating joy and

support to all of us.

"Religion is not based on miracles. Put them on
one side. They are often symbolical; at any rate the
supernatural life is not based on them. The super-

Introduction xxv

natural life is the life of prayer. By supernatural means
we do and become things we could not otherwise do or
become; by supernatural means we are linked to God
through Our Lord and his Church. How marvellous
is the supernatural life in the Church, that great
hierarchy and interconnection of souls! Our Lord
always banded people together; a little company and
a head, the Apostles, the family. The parables are full
of all this; always Christ speaks of a little company,
and then their head. He seems always to work that
way: the disciples, then St. Peter, the Church. It is
always a company, a head, never a purely individual
way. Do you sufficiently understand the idea of the
Church the supernatural life of the Church? the
aggregate of souls in the Church? the two aspects,
the fed, and the feeding side? The Spirit of Our Lord
in the Church, the separate Person of the Church,
not simply the piling-on of persons, the addition of
souls, but the separate Person of the Church. Both
the communion of souls the visible body of Christ
and his Spirit on earth and the invisible Church;
the body and the soul, the Bride of Christ. Yes. And
we are fragments of the Bride.

"I hope you will always follow the mind of the
Church. I like to notice how instinctively you do so
already. People often ask me what religion is for.
What is the use of religion? I do not know how to
answer. I simply cannot say more than this that
I simply cannot get on without it. I must have it to
moderate me, to water me down, to make me possible.
I am so claimful, so self-occupied, so intense. I want
everything my own way. It is the difficulties and
dangers in people that make them saints. It is almost

xxvi Introduction

impossible to me sometimes to stand people with God
without God it would have been impossible. If I had
not had my religion I should have been a blackguard.

"I want to write so plainly and fully in my book
about the problem of evil, the power of evil in a
world ruled by an omnipotent God the source of all
good; we never get rid of this problem. We can only
minimise it. There are people who pretend that the
earthquake at Tokio was a good thing to have cancer
in the face is somehow splendid, and shows the goodness
of God! I hate all that talk. Evil is a mystery, and you
don't do away with it by calling it good. People often
find strange reasons for disbelieving in God. They say
so many things, ask so many questions about the
Inquisition, about Galileo but they leave out this
the great question the problem of evil. They strain
at a gnat and swallow a camel. I want you so to keep
the conception of freedom clear and crisp in your
mind. I think you do. There is now a widespread
opinion and propaganda which I am sure is shallow
and sterilising. According to this view the liability
to sin and evil in human beings is inextricably con-
nected with man's freedom, with our being capable
of virtue without the bad, no possibility of evil
the possibility of sin is thus the price of the actuality
of virtue and sanctity. This view, if true, might help
us in our problem of evil. But is it true? I am sure
it is not. On this point it is impossible to better
St. Augustine's 'To be able not to sin is a great
liberty, but to be unable to sin is the greatest liberty.'
We can at once see this to be true if we think of God.

"How horrible you felt it in that High Churchman's
paper when he spoke of potential evil in God! This

Introduction xxvii

incapacity to sin is no limit to God's freedom; to be
perfectly free means spontaneously to always love and
will what is perfectly beautiful, perfectly true, per-
fectly good. The mere ability to will otherwise is
already an imperfection of the will. Hence man can
will, can commit evil not because he is free, but because
he is imperfectly free. The question that remains is
why God who doubtless knows well this imperfection,
and cannot love it as such, and who cannot but have
known the great evils that spring from this imperfec-
tion why did he not make man with a perfect liberty?
Man would have been more rather than less good
and all the misery and sin and evil would have been
avoided.

"I do not believe in the answer that God wanted
a variety of goodness in the world; for here we have
an opening of countless degrees of evil. Nor do I believe
that God made man thus capable of sin from a pre-
vision that he would fall, and that thus God would
raise him, and through the Redemption raise him
higher than he would have been without the Fall and
the Redemption. For if penitence in man and mercy
in God are beautiful things, sin nevertheless is a
terrible price to pay for even these. If God could
create finite beings incapable of willing evil, a con-
dition of things admirably higher than that of liberty
of choice, he would have done so. I believe there is
only one way out: to hold as follows:

"Aquinas draws out very fully the doctrine that the
Divine Omnipotence must not be taken as the power
to effect any imaginable thing, but only the power
to effect what is within the nature of things
ultimately according to the nature of God. God

xxviii Introduction

cannot violate his own nature. Now I take it that
whether we see it or not, it is contrary to the nature
of things for a finite being to possess perfect liberty,
to be incapable of violating its true nature (and God
himself, though infinite, cannot create infinite beings).
The real alternative would thus be, not whether
God should create beings with perfect or beings with
imperfect liberty: but only whether the beings whom
alone he could create (beings with imperfect liberty)
would bring more happiness than misery, or more
misery than happiness, into the world; and I take it
that God will have seen that far more happiness than
misery would have been brought into existence by
the creation of beings capable of sin; and he would
have preferred to bring that happiness into being,
even accompanied by this misery.

" I should love you to be penetrated thus by the sense
of this true liberty of God, and by the need for grace,
God's constant prevenience and gift. I want you also
to feel this gift to spring, not from the intensity of
evil in human nature, but from the weakness in that
nature. Those who most exalt the power and need of
grace do so usually by most depreciating nature. God
thus gets glorified in direct proportion as man gets
vilified. The more holy I find God, the more wicked
I feel myself to be. This is touching and real, and
almost irresistible to vehement natures, but it is
dangerous and excessive. The inconstancy, variety
and insufficiency of nature this is the central fact
with us with its profound need of grace, and its
incapacity to gain grace of itself. I wonder if you
have noticed one more pathetic condition of our little
earthly lot? that not only even sanctity as it is among

Introduction xxix

human beings here below is almost always limited in
this or that, or in several directions but that even
where it is fully great and adequate its delicate
originality is somewhat blunted and blurred before
it can circulate freely amongst the average souls,
which are not comfortable except with something a
little banal and thin. How much I have noticed this!
How much one sees this in the pathetic transformation
that St. Catherine of Genoa's figure has to go through
at the hands of Battista! How much less attractive,
less expansive, less entrancing she becomes than at
the hands of Ettore, and then of the popular devotion!
Popular devotions always need something a little
almost vulgar, somehow. There are parallels of this
even in Biblical writings.

"I wonder if you have seen how much you will be
called on to help people to help souls. The golden
rule is, to help those we love to escape from us; and
never try to begin to help people, or influence them,
till they ask, but wait for them. Souls are never dittos.
The souls thus to be helped are mostly at quite different
stages from our own, or they have quite a different
attrait. One should wait silent for those who do not
open out to us, who are not intended, perhaps, ever
to be helped by us except by our prayers (the best
of all helps). We must be tolerant and patient, too,
with those we can, and ought to help. This difference
in souls wakes us up, and makes us more sensitive and
perceptive. Many women are better helped by women
than by men. Yet how few women are sufficiently
trained interiorly to be able to help wisely!

"There are such differences of soul! Some people
are like geometrical patterns. They worship in wide

xxx Introduction

geometrical lines. Others worship a light that fringes
off into darkness. Don't try to be like other people,
or to make them like you. Puck may want to be
a cat, but he can't be a cat. It would be a great
pity if he could become a cat. I must wear my own
top-hat, and also I must not kick anyone else's
top-hat.

"I love Browning's poem Muleykeh. It is the story of
a man who gives up his mare, his Pearl, because if
he kept her she would become less than her best.
How beautiful that is, and how touching! I will read
it to you. He teaches her himself how to escape from
him, though it breaks his own heart.

"Prayer and suffering for others, voluntarily given,
is like storing up riches for souls. No one can take
the place of others for contrition, but he can, God
willing, for satisfaction. Never forget the enormous
variety of souls. This will help to develop still more in
you the sense of interdependence, the hierarchy of souls
the Church the Kingdom of Heaven, as conceived
and awakened by our Lord.

"It is curious, but it seems to me that some people
are quite deficient in the religious sense. I don't under-
stand it at all. They are like people who are without
the musical sense. God must allow it, it is somehow
his will. Religion to them, is a purely this-world affair.
"God is a kind of chalk pit. Religion is not of this world,
it is supernatural, it leavens the world. They can
never understand this, and the need for this leaven.
The Church works in two levels. She is never the
State. She is not the police, nor a sanitary engineer,
nor a bricklayer, nor a builder, nor a plumber.
Marriage, having children, education, proper clothes,

Introduction xxxi

decent behaviour, the plumber all these are good
things, but they are not religion. The essence of
religion is the supernatural life; the other world, the
otherness of God, different from, but penetrating this
our life. That is God's level. The natural level is the
State, etc. The Church must never be the State.
People put God so far away, in a sort of mist some-
where. I pull their coat-tails. God is near. He is no
use unless he is near. God's otherness and difference,
and his nearness. You must get that. God's nearness
is straight out of the heart of Jesus. Religion is like a
cuckoo in some people's nest. They do not understand
man's need. No man is satisfied in a swimming-bath;
he knocks his knees and elbows against its sides; he
wants the sea. So with man's soul, he hungers and
thirsts for the ocean, for God; God infinite and other,
different to man, yet working in man. God's given-
ness. Love, suffering, renunciation, they are God's
level; the passion and hunger for God comes from God, j
and God answers it with Christ. We are creatures, 1
and we must be creaturely. If you go out and look
at the stars, can you be so puffed out, so like a balloon
as to think this earth is the only inhabited world of
all those millions of stars? Do you think man the only
conscious being God has made? Are you so like a
balloon? I always tried to teach my children humility.
I do not believe we shall ever have the Kingdom of
Heaven here, not in this world. The Sermon on the
Mount cannot be here. George cannot give the Kaiser
his cheek to strike. You cannot give all that you have
to the poor. The kingdom cannot be here. That is
God's level. Utopias are no use. How boring are
Utopias! The hunger and thirst for God in man's soul

xxxii Introduction

can never be answered here; nothing but God himself
is the answer, is any use.

"I always encourage people to practise many non-
religious interests in their Lives. It's so important in
helping others, and to keep your own religion full and
mixed. You would find your religion itself grow thin
and poor, sentimental, without this practice. Do not
have too many practices; the soul to grow needs quiet.
I rather hate all these religious conferences and con-
fabulations; I don't believe they do religion much
good. We talk such a lot about toleration nowadays:
take care. In nine cases out of ten toleration means
indifference. What people love and admire most in
people is what they believe: their affirmations, not
their negations. It is not Darwin's negation of religion
we love, but his science of plants: it is not your
father's agnosticism, but his love and joy and his
music that are so precious.

"The central fact of religion is not survival, but
God. I am almost not interested in survival, unless it
means God. Survival must mean God, or it means
nothing at all. There are people who try to prove
God only as a means to immortality; they have got
it all upside down. How secondary is immortality to
God! I always think St. Paul was excessive with his
"Let us eat, drink and be merry," for look at the
Psalmists! They hardly believed in immortality. They
did not think about it. Yet theirs is the deepest ex-
pression we know of love of God, of sanctity and
holiness, and of joy. What joy they contain! They
express the joy of the Saints. I do not believe we
should all be sinners without this hope. I do not
believe it.

Introduction xxxiii

"To know God here is something to know him
and have union with him here through Our Lord,
that would be enough without immortality. Look at
St. Catherine of Siena; she saw Heaven here and
now in the soul through its union with God. Heaven
is within the soul.

"Hell? Well, God calls you through love and if
the love of God is not enough to make you good,
perhaps you had better have fear. It is better to be
good somehow, than not to be good at all, if you
can't get any further than that.

"People dislike and despise symbols so much now-
adays, and yet how necessary they are! They are most
inadequate, but that doesn't matter. Once when I
was very ill, I dwelt all the time on a picture of the
Sacred Heart. It was everything to me, I looked at
it and prayed to it all the time, it was the only thing
that seemed to make my illness bearable. After some
years I saw this picture again: it was odious, vulgar,
such a trashy picture! I was ashamed to think what
it had been to me yet it had been everything! You
see how the sensible always conveys the spiritual: the
invisible in the visible. Christ everywhere makes use
of the sensible to convey the spiritual, never the spirit
alone. Man is spirit and body; he has arms and legs,
he is not spirit alone, he is not even an angel. The
spirit is stimulated through the senses to object to
this is foolishness. Christ never left them out: the
women who touched him, the clay on the eyes. He
always and everywhere makes use of the sensible.
Thus the bread and the wine. Man needs the sensible
so long as he is man and not spirit alone.

"I want you to hold very clearly, to see as clearly

xxxiv Introduction

as you can see anything, the truth not that all religions
are true, but that all contain some element of truth,
some fragment from God. But they vary in value
greater or less they are never interchangeable. God has
never left the world in complete and groping dark-
ness; all religions contain some light from God. They
are all from him. It is an awful idea that souls who
cannot have known Our Lord should be debarred
from God. None of the saints believed that. Even now
only one in five people have ever heard of Our
Lord. That's why I don't worry about Baptists and
Unitarians. They can all get into my waistcoat
pocket. The future of Anglicanism seems to me very
dark unless they can revive the sense of adoration. You
can't have religion without adoration. The Reforma-
tion was a poor thing: and some people admire it so!
It halved everything. We want more God, more
Christ. The negation of things is Protestant, as
opposed to Passion.

"Our bodies are clumsy old fellows, we want too
much of them: we try to express angel faces in worsted,
to play Bach on a penny whistle, Beethoven on a
hurdy-gurdy. The soul lives in two worlds hence the
tension.

"The essence of sin is to take the jam without the
powder. I want to speak of the abiding consequence
of sin. We seem to be going all wrong here. The
modern non-Catholics are giving this, the abiding
consequences, up altogether. We are so fond of men,
we can't keep God. The most subtle enemy of religion
is humanitarianism. If Christianity is true, there must
be abiding consequences. We can't get rid of it, it's
in all the Gospels. Our Lord speaks of it several times.

Introduction xxxv

His message is an immense warning to us here and
now, a terrific alternative. You must see that. If you
read the Gospels and give that up, I don't know
what you see.

"Purgatory and Hell may be refined, but they must
be there. The majority of souls can't go straight to
Heaven; but God will never turn away from that soul
that turns to him even only at the last. It is wilful sin,
the will turning away from God to the very end, that
makes Hell. That soul is in Hell that finally rejects
and turns away from God. It must be so. God him-
self can't alter that, it is the soul's own choice and
abiding-place the abiding consequences. Sin is a
disharmony. I keep that."

During the last few months of my uncle's life we
had our talks every week as usual, but he was very
tired. He used up all his strength on the book about
God that he wanted so much to finish, he spoke of it
often. He seemed full of a deep peace and content.
I think he felt his work was nearly done. He spoke
very often of Troeltsch, whose death he felt very
keenly. He had hoped to have so much from him, but
"he was much further than I thought from Christianity.
He must have changed a lot of late, more than I knew.
But I like to hope and think that his soul was more
Christian than he knew. I believe he was fundamentally
Christian, and had he lived he would have returned to
it fully and truly. Troeltsch used to laugh at me and
say: 'Baron, you talk and talk. You make out this
and that reason for people doing things, but the real
reason is that people are so stupid.'" He often spoke
of Tyrrell and his restless sceptical mind. "I remember

xxxvi Introduction

the very place where Tyrrell said to me, 'We shall go
separate ways. You believe in love as the final end,
but I believe in love and hate. I believe in the devil,
I fight him with hate.' I always felt restless after
being with him: one is always restless after being with
sceptical minds." He spoke of how difficult it was
for young people to understand the need for religion.
"They have not enough experience, they need
humility; that will come." He spoke of his horror of
Pantheism, but how we escaped it through Christ:
"A great foot, a pierced foot, prevents that door
closing there." "Pantheism as a programme is no
use," he said one day. He spoke of young Anglican
clergy whom he found too fond of kite-flying. "They
seem to have got a kind of Christism now, not God.
God is too difficult.' Christ is easy. (Is he easy?) They
must have everything easy. We hardly need God if
we have Christ. How different all this is to Our Lord
himself. Did he not come to show us the Father? Well,
you can obscure Christ, but you can't shake him. So
many people are too clever for religion: we want less
brains, more heart. Brains are no use, we want the
child. I always try to get the child to come up in
people."

He spoke very often of the Catholic Church, of
what he owed to her, of what she was, her depth and
breadth: "I ask myself which is the greater, depth or
breadth? Depth matters most. Rome has that: she is
deepest." He spoke of Huvelin: "Sometimes I ask
myself the wisest, widest, deepest men I have known
are not they all Roman Catholics? Yes, they are."
He spoke of the sacramental life of the Church; of the
great supernatural life and communion of souls, of

Introduction xxxvii

God's unique gift to the Church. "Has she not some-
thing something peculiar to her alone, something
specific, something unique? There, that's what we
want; we cannot do without that. The Roman
Catholic Church is like a great ship, first she rolls
this way, then she rolls that, till she finds her equi-
librium; and then how wise are her judgments! How
magnificent her decisions!" Another day he said,
"You can't be a Roman for nothing. There is a ten-
sion here, a heroism, an other- worldness. If you don't
feel it, then it's your fault. There must be some change
in you."

I believe there are people who speak of my uncle
as a great theologian, but hardly a true member
of the Roman Catholic Church. I do not know
what to say to these: they seem to me so far from
the truth to know and understand him so little
that they have not found him at all. He lived so
deeply in his Church's life that I cannot think of him
as without her. His whole life and practice were
inspired by her teaching and doctrine. He lived
within all her boundaries, his mind was knit to, and
his soul fed by, her soul. Everything he did was
"to be in the mind of the Church." To try and
isolate him from what she made is simply not possible,
for he would inevitably cease to be all that made
him himself. I feel as though I could not speak strongly
enough for him here. For to me whom he taught,
there was always this note, always this background;
the necessity for man of a Church, the basis of all
real sanctity; and for the greatest here below, the
supernatural life of the Roman Catholic Church, "the
deepest of all, spiritually, mystically, supernaturally."

xxxviii Introduction

To cut him away from her, and to expect him to live
as well separate heat from fire, heart-beats from life!

True, he often spoke of Institutional Christianity as
his hair-shirt his Church his deepest pain. But how
far this is from hisjinal word on the subject! Were not
"costingness" and "tension" the two great elements
of growth? Was not pain his greatest teacher? Did not
just such an intense and claimful nature as his require
more than anything the discipline and training, and
the food, of the Roman Catholic Church? He gives
himself a clear answer when discussing this question
(in regard to the Sadhu): "The answer comes clear
and complete. The price is assuredly so great that
only a strong faith can pay it, but the gain is profound.
And I know not whether of anything worth having
for men here below more than this can be said."

The Roman Church was the sap of his spirit, her
life, the life within his own. How we should misunder-
stand him if we did not get that!

He was constantly affirming to me the need of some
Church appurtenance 1 (just as in prayer he coun-
selled always some vocal prayer Our Father the
Creed the Psalms, and one decade of the Rosary
daily; and of course always a daily reading of the
New Testament and the Imitation if possible) ; and for
those biggest souls that he saw and loved, he longed
most of all, that they should eventually find their
home and rest in the Roman Catholic Church,
"that great supernatural home and communion of
souls." He longed for them to accept just "that
relative ordinaryness assuredly costing to human

1 A very favourite word of my uncle's in this connection, meaning
some sort or kind of Church faith and practice.

Introduction xxxix

nature, but uniquely dear to God." Towards the end
he spoke wistfully of these very often, for to him they
seemed not yet sufficiently on their knees.

And yet he trembled at the idea of anyone's chang-
ing. (I was not received myself till September 1926.)
He begged one to put off making a decision, to wait
patiently for more light to avoid all rash judgments
and action.

He was so afraid, lest it was his influence, or one's
love for him making one wish to be where he was,
that made one restless. His reluctance to allow me to
consider, at first, the possibility of my changing from
Anglican to Catholic, was the measure of his sense
of responsibility, his recognition of the difference in
souls, and in their state. " I never want to convert any
soul that is practising in good faith what religion it
possesses," he once said, "I only want to deepen and
strengthen what that soul has already got. But, on
the other hand, if I meet a non-pratiquant Roman
Catholic, I cannot rest for longing till I have brought
it back to some, if not to the full practice of the
Roman Faith."

He told me often of people who had changed under
his influence, and had become poor or even unprac-
tising Catholics and how he felt himself to blame
in having unsettled them, and given them what they
were not ready for. This was the deepest grief to him:
"When I think of these, and it is quite a long list,
how I wish I had never talked to them!" He saw
too, and valued so greatly, the affirmations of other
churches and religions, that he was anxious one
should not clutch at fuller treasures with unworthy
or unready hands. No doubt as he grew older his

xl Introduction

sense of his own dependence made him more and more
aware of the vitality, the difference, the costingness and
reality of his Church's life. For there is another life
here "a heroism" which he loved, a life of which
he, more than any, would wish one to be worthy. He
feared lest one should step lightly over. Catholicism
does not wear all its riches on the outside.

Who can but be touched at this his tender solicitude
for each soul's best, his anxiety lest he should be
pushing one where one had not yet been called to go?
Then he so disliked and distrusted hurry and antici-
pation change, excitement and reaction were all his
greatest foes; dullness and routine, faithfully accepted,
were, he believed, a necessity for the soul's growth.
And last, in his most touching confidence, he often
told me how he felt sure that God loved and blessed
my way and prayer; and. that failing any great light
to the contrary, I should remain docile and humble,
trying to put on one side any impatience or thought
of changing, till I felt it clearly a sin to remain where
I was.

All this seems to me most wise, a fatherly wisdom.
But I do blame myself for not showing him, and saying
out more certainly as time passed, that I had found
where was my home and necessity. He knew I had
never seen the need for any Church till I knew him,
nor did I know the possibility of loving any Church
till I found his. But this was not enough. I had to
show him more and this I could not do. I was so
used to listening and accepting, not explaining. So
each time that I grew restless, I tried again to care
for what had grown to seem so empty, to follow what
he had advised. I loved and practised one way, while

Introduction xli

joined officially to something to which I felt quite
strange, and I tried to remain content in this my
double state. I did not see that these alternations were
not wholesome, and that there can be difficulties
that sterilise, longings unfulfilled that may destroy all
enthusiasm and conviction. My soul poised between
two centres, and knowing where she should be, began
to suffer loss.

But in his knowledge and determination that no
emotion or influence should guide one, how right and
true that was! And how significant of the truth au
fond is the fact that when I did change, the call came
unadorned by any joy or emotion, only a hard and
naked will to follow God was what I found.

Now that he is gone, and one reads his books as
a whole, it is impossible not to be deeply impressed
by the lovely growth of his mind and soul within
that great Communion. He matures and mellows
quite clearly beneath our eyes. Towards the end, his
whole nature seems to burst into flower, and that
gentleness and geniality he loves so much becomes
his own. Those "drops of clear religious wine" he
speaks of, have purified him of any imperfection and
strain; he is full of a touching humility and under-
standing, a reaching out to all the other sorts of minds
he saw and longed to love. His soul refreshes ours in
its clear spring of tenderness and hope. He had, no
doubt, to be where truth was fullest, love deepest;
no half-way-house could satisfy a soul like his. He
needed, too, all that huge tradition, that vast, wide
world, that spacious home for every kind of soul and
saint.

His passion could find no rest in cold conven-

xlii Introduction

tionality; and he loved, almost most of all, to share
in the homeliness of his great Church. He often asked
me to notice in all the pre-Reformation churches and
cathedrals, the little touching evidences of a different
form of faith. He never failed to say, "in your little
pre-Reformation church."

Once, years ago, I ignorantly asked him if it were
not the same "just the same thing really" to him,
were his friends Catholics or of any other sort of faith?

I do not forget his answer, I do not forget his face.
The stupidity of my question quite upset him and
after a pause, he said, looking rather distressed, "The
same thing how can it be the same thing? My little
old thing, you do not understand. I love many
Anglicans, High Church, Broad Unitarians, Pres-
byterians yes yes all many. But it is not the same
thing to me it can never be the same thing": then, in
his deepest, most vibrant tones, "I am a child of the
Confessional I am a son of the great Roman Church."

A few days before he died he said, "I wait for the
breath of God, for God's breath. Perhaps he will call
me to-day to-night. Don't let us be niggardly towards
God. He is never a niggard towards us. Let us try
to be generous and accept. My illness is so little!
I have no pain my brain is clear why should
I not accept this generously? I would like to finish
my book but if not, I shall live it out in the Beyond.
I love the angels, they stand for something we
cannot otherwise express. . . .

"Plant yourself on foundations that are secure
God Christ Suffering the Cross. They are secure.
How I love the Sacraments! I am as certain of the
Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist as of anything

Introduction xliii

there is. Our great hope is in Christianity our only
hope. Christ re-creates. Christianity has taught us
to care. Caring is the greatest thing caring matters
most. My faith is not enough it comes and goes.
I have it about some things and not about others. So
we make up and supplement each other. We give
and others give to us. Keep your life a life of prayer,
dearie. Keep it like that: it's the only thing, and
remember, no joy without suffering no patience
without trial no humility without humiliation no
life without death."

I was ill with influenza when my uncle died, and
I saw him for the last time four days before his death.
He was very tired and weak, and everything was a
great effort. But he spoke of nearly everyone he
seemed to be recalling them one by one. He spoke,
too, of the Resurrection.

When I look back on all these talks, the letters and
this companionship, I know them to be the greatest
privilege and joy I shall ever receive. If I have learnt
anything, it is from him that I learned and with
him there went a great dignity out of life. But I have
never felt sad or separated from him. How should
I? What he taught me has carried me on.

" Our Lord is full of a great tenderness tenderness
and austerity. There is no tenderness without austerity
no love or greatness almost, without it. Our Lord
saw that suffering was knit into human nature, but
he does not become morbid over it. He sees it is not
the end. He sees the coming of joy, the suffering
ending in the crown the coming of joy through
and because of this suffering."

I was already thirty-eight when first my uncle

xliv Introduction

began to teach me. I had known him as a child, but
I was afraid of him then. I was afraid first of his
deafness and of his ear-trumpet; and next I was
afraid of his strangeness. When I saw him at my
grandmother's I always hoped I would not have to
sit next to him at luncheon. I liked to watch him, but
I dreaded to attract his attention. He seemed to me
something so different and unordinary, something
rather wild, a being belonging to another world.
When, years later, he first began to talk to me, he
told me how he had never forgotten the strange little
girl who used to sit and stare at him and how he
had said to my aunt, "I feel so sorry for that poor
little thing; she will never fit into this world, she
comes from another star." These words of his are so
characteristic, and they comfort one too. For they
show that though we cannot be the same in degree,
we can share in kind with what we love most.

Here, at the end, with so much left out and forgotten*
I must stop. The least and the last of his many friends,
I can speak less than any of those deepest things that
he spent his life in pursuing. I can say so little of his
passionate search for truth: in philosophy, theology,
religion; in life and in love: he sought, apprehended,
suffered and pursued, with a faith that ended only
with his death. How much he found! I am confused
to tell of even the beginnings. He saw "certain dim
assurances"; he worshipped "a light that fringes off
into darkness"; he found the reality of God, and the
entire givenness of all our spiritual life, love, and
prayer. To these things his soul vibrated; they made
a commotion within his whole being that one would
be blind not to see.

Introduction xlv

Through suffering he discovered joy, and to his
"final note of joy" he added love.

"Christianity taught us to care. Caring is the
greatest thing, caring matters most." These seem to
me his last most final words, uttered in a voice so
small and still and far away, it seemed hardly his own.

Love and joy are the way; for joy without love could
have no being: love and joy together, springing up
united from suffering here below, rise in adoration
to find God.

GWENDOLEN GREENE.

In Festo B.M.V. de Monte Carmelo, 1928.

LETTERS

VICARAGE GATE, W.

My very dear G\ven, 25 April, 1918.

Your Aunt Mary showed me your plucky letter
received by her yesterday morning. I was in church
at Holy Communion this morning, and I then prayed
and thought very specially of my very dear Niece
that every deep, rich growth, happiness and faith-
fulness may attend and fulfil her life and work and
sufferings and various joys. Four points occurred to
me I will put them down here for you, since now,
lying up, you may care to let them simmer in your
heart, and to get them to bloom into action or habit.
This, however in proportion, pray as any of it really
comes home to, really fits your own sight or search
such things ought always to feel, at first, as just a
size or two too big for us as what gently stimulates
us to a further growth and expansion; but they should
always be quietly ignored, if, and in so far as they
come before our quiet look at them as conundrums
simply imposed on us from without.

(i) I am, then, really grateful (given you are run
down and require a rest) that you are, plainly, much
worn and tired for only so would you give up for a
bit, and get looked after properly, and thoroughly
rested back into full power, and it will be delightful
if, without straining, you can now and then quietly
browse through that charming Boissier or Horace

3

4 Baron Von HUgel's

and Virgil and perhaps this or that other of the
books on Roman things.

(2) ...

(3) I continue much struck, my very dear Gwen,
with your (very rare) youthfulness and keen ardour
of mind. Your continuous openness to the impressions
(fresh as ever) brought you by all things beautiful
and true and good. Do you realise how rare this gift
is? That it is a gift, one of the most precious of the
gifts of God? That it is a form and kind of deep
faith a true prayer? I ask all this that you may mix
with these admirations, more and more, little exclama-
tions of gratitude, of union with, of adoration of God,
present in all this truth, beauty, and goodness. You
could gradually develop this into spontaneous habit.

(4) For years I have loved and prayed this prayer,
Dearie. If it makes sense to you, you too might begin
your day with it. "Receive, O Lord, my entire liberty
my understanding, my memory, my will. From
Thee I have received all things to Thee do I return
all things. Give me but Thy Grace and Thy Love.
I ask not anything else of Thee." 1 . . .

Loving old Uncle,

Freddy H.

My very dear Gwen, 30 September, 1918.

This is a letter all about your most dear father
only, of course. But, being thus, you may not feel it
inopportune you may even like to have it for rumina-
tion since, though you must be longing to help, there
cannot be much, at least of an external, practical kind,
that you can do for him, just now.

1 St. Ignatius.

Letters to a Niece 5

Well, then, first I want to say how deeply I care, how
deeply I mind. I have known your father for nearly
half a century; during all that time I have been getting
to know fresh people, and have been getting to know
those I knew already far more widely and deeply,
I believe. And yet I have never, before those years
or during them, known a man so utterly generous, so
essentially lovable, as your father. Of course I know
well, besides, that he is a real genius a genius of a
large, rare kind a genius in music. But though
I admire this, and I thank God for it this, in itself,
is nothing lovable. What I love so in him is his radiant
lovingness that rich spending, without thought of its
being anything other than simply natural, utterly
delightful, of a loving heart, upon whomsoever he
may meet who at all appeals to it. And the appeal is
felt to come, not from the apparent cleverness, or
riches, or charm, but simply from the fellow-creature's
need and cry for help and sympathy. What an untold
world of kindness, of paternal help and warmth, he
must have given away throughout all these years at
the college.

It is, then, a deep, deep grief, Gwen, to have to
fear, from your letter, that we are probably about to
lose him, in and during this our little earthly life.
Then, next, I want to confess to you a prick and a
pang of conscience which has been with me con-
cerning him ever since we travelled down to Wilton
together for your Uncle Mingo's funeral. I suppose I
was overwrought or something else odd and abnormal,
but, anyhow, I told him in starting on the journey,
that I did not want to converse especially not about
music. Alas, alas: how rude, how impertinent, how

6 Baron Von Hugel's

entirely contrary to my own self when reasonable at
all! I have longed to find the opportunity to beg his
kind pardon for this but have never seemed to find
it without making a fuss somehow. So, my dear
child, you who have inherited so much of his glorious
generosity tell God for me, by your father's side,
how deeply I love him, how vexed I continue with
myself about that silly act of mine.

And lastly, my Niece, let me say one little word
about a much deeper matter. Your father, Dear, like
your also fine-charactered uncle, George grew up,
and lived to middle life, during a religiously sceptical
time they could hardly escape that all-pervading
atmosphere in any case they did not escape it.
I love to feel that, even in those times, your father
believed more than he thought he did; and again
that, since then, he has quite possibly silently come
to considerably more belief, even in his own con-
sciousness concerning his convictions. I should dearly
like, if he is still sufficiently, for short whiles, himself,
that you should ask him quite simply to affirm his
faith, his love in God or, better still, some little
aspiration directly to God Himself.

With entire resignation into His hands,

F. v. H.

13 VICARAGE GATE, KENSINGTON, W.

My very dear Gwen, 9 October, 1918.

Oh, we are sad at his having gone the generous,
simple, loving soul the genius with a heart of a
boy and yet with all a father's tenderness for quite

Letters to a Niece 7

a world of souls. You evidently expected this ending
you Gwen, did. But your mother, poor thing, may
have gone on hoping to the end, in which case the
shock of his going will, we fear, be all the greater.
How devotedly he loved on, from the first and un-
ceasingly to the end! There, too so fine a man; for
such things are not mere accidents they show a
man's his nobility of nature.

I trust and fancy that he did not suffer much, even
at the end. If so, that will have been a great relief
to you all, for him so extra-alive, so sensitive a con-
stitution and nature. Much as I feel for you, very
dear Niece for you so like him in many ways and
for Dolly, who also loved him so much and who was
so much loved by him: I yet feel most sorry somehow
next, of course, to your mother for that world of
his at the College of Music. The loss to hundreds of
men and women, young and now middle-aged, who
were there, or are still there must be literally
irreplaceable irreparable, because your father was
not simply a man who knew his business nor even a
man of real or great talent; no, but because he was a
man of deep genius, and who, as such, could divine
when ny scraps of genius were lurking in others, and
irreparable, even more, because his combination of
such genius with his, in any walk of life, most rare
steadiness and volume of selfless interest and affection
of truly parental character is doubtless specially
rare amongst musicians. Certainly Beethoven was not
like that, nor Wagner. . . .

Forgive absence of mourning paper.

8 Baron Von Hiigel's

13 VICARAGE GATE, KENSINGTON, W.8

My very dear Gwen, 11 December, 1918.

No letter you will ever write to me shall, please
God, ever remain unanswered shall remain without
a reply as careful and complete as I can manage to
make it. But you may have to wait a bit, my Niece.
I never could write with ease not on such subjects,
where we should never write, speak, or think except
with voce di petto, never with voce di testa. And now
I am still weak, and empty of brain, hence a further
delay.

Let me make three or four points of your letter; and
try to explain these as well as I now can manage.

i. The gradual preparation for, and God's revelations
preceding, His fullest self-revelation in Christianity.

I am very glad you apprehend and appreciate this
great fact a fact, however, which you will have to
learn to apply, not only to the succession of history, but
also to the simultaneous present. What I mean is that,
not only was Judaism especially, yet also, in lesser
and other degrees, Hellenism, Hinduism, etc., an
historically previous preparation by God Himself for
the fuller and fullest self-revelation; but this holds
still of those imperfect, mixed forms and degrees of
light, in so far as they still continue distinct in the
world. The synagogue here in Bayswater is still now,
on ii December, 1918, a fragmentary but very real
revelation of God and, however unconsciously, a very
real pedagogue to Christ. The little mosque at Wokmg
is still, for some souls, a yet more fragmentary but
still real revelation of God and teacher of truths more

Letters to a Niece 9

completely taught by Christianity. All this, however,
only in so far as the souls thus helped have no interior
incitement to move on and up into a fuller, truer
religion. And nothing of all this means that these
various religions are equally true (or false), and that
it does not matter to which you belong (provided
only you are in good faith). No: in these deepest and
most delicate of all matters, even a little more light,
more power, more reality even what "looks" a
"little" means, and is very, profoundly much. It
all only means, that nowhere does God leave Himself
without some witness, and without some capacity on
the part of the soul (always more or less costingly) to
respond to, and to execute this His witness. And,
again, that everywhere the means and the process
are from fidelity to the light already possessed (yet
often difficult to see owing to the agitations and
cowardice of the soul), to further light, which again,
in its turn, demands a delicate, difficult fidelity and
fresh sacrifices. Yet with each such fidelity and sacri-
fice, the peace, the power, the joy, the humble fruit-
fulness of the soul grow. Always it is a search for
expansion and happiness, found in acts gently costly
and increasingly exacting.

2. Only the best attractive to you ; and any, every church,
very middling, hence dull, repulsive. Thus you do not go to
country church services, etc.

The touching, entrancing beauty of Christianity, my
Niece, depends upon a subtle something which all this
fastidiousness ignores. Its greatness, its special genius,
consists, as much as in anything else, in that it is
without this fastidiousness. A soul that is, I do not

io Baron Von HilgeTs

say tempted, but dominated, by such fastidiousness,
is as yet only hovering round the precincts of Chris-
tianity, but it has not entered its sanctuary, where
heroism is always homely, where the best always acts
as a stimulus towards helping towards being (in a
true sense) but one of the semi-articulate, bovine,
childish, repulsively second-third-fourth-rate crowd.
So it was with Jesus Himself; so it was with Francis,
the Poverello; so it is with every soul that has fully
realised the genius of the Christian paradox. When
I told you of my choking emotion in reading, in
St. John's Gospel, that scene of Jesus, the Light of
the World (that He is this, is an historic fact), as the
menial servant at the feet of those foolish little fisher-
men and tax-gatherers, what do you think moved me
but just that huge, life-and-love-bringing paradox,
here in its fullest activity? The heathen philosophies,
one and all, failed to get beyond your fastidiousness;
only Christianity got beyond it; only Christianity.
But I mean a deeply, costingly realised, Christianity
got beyond it: Gwen will, some day, get beyond it.
It is, really, a very hideous thing; the full, truly free,
beauty of Christ alone completely liberates us from
this miserable bondage.

"Well, perhaps yes," you will say, "but what am
I, here and now, to do?" Do, as to church-going,
nothing but what you already do. Only be very con-
scientious and regular in going to your Holy Com-
munions, whether in country or town, and in going
to church every Sunday when you are in town. But
as to your thinking and speaking, pray, and ruminate,
Niece, over what I have been saying; look out in your
readings for what confirms it; grow shy of any defence

Letters to a Niece 1 1

of fastidiousness; pray to God gradually to cure you of
it, if and when you come fairly to see it to be a poor,
a very poor, thing. You rightly dislike Pater's "affecta-
tion." What I call "preciousness." Well, in face of
the dread facts of human nature, and of the rich
teaching of history, that church-fastidiousness is a
sort of Paterism.

3. What is the precise meaning of Thekla's insistence
upon religion as primarily an is-ness, not an ought-ness ?

A good question. Well, you see, Niece, when the
Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation, and later
the French Revolution came, they, in part, only
articulated, but also they, in part, each differently,
yet all greatly, fed and excited a reaction which had
permeated the educated average man of Western
Europe ever since, say, A.D. 1300. It was a reaction
away from the (by then too exclusive) occupation
with the object with things, ta*ken as though appre-
hended by us without our minds, and especially
with supernatural things, taken as so different in kind
from our natural endowments, as to require a sheer
imposing from without a simple plastering on to
the human soul and mind. These doctrines, against
which there came the reaction, are not the doctrines
really held by the Middle Ages at their best say,
from A.D. 1 100 to A.D. 1300, but they were the doctrines
of the later, moribund Middle Ages, and they were
doctrines by which those Renaissance, Reformation
and Revolution doctrinaires were really profoundly
infected as is always the case with men who do not
patiently study the past (also the more recent past)
and who, instead of discriminating, condemn what is

12 Baron Von

before them as it stands who do not untie knots, but
who cut them. Again, Dear, do you note? Life taken
cheaply "cheaply," I mean, because practised and
sought outside of, and not within, and by working
through, its entanglements! Well, now, these three
(and other) specifically "modern" movements have
been very largely dominated by a most ruinous,
excessive, or even exclusive insistence upon the subject
your own (or at least humanity's) apprehending
powers, feelings, etc. These subjective powers get, here,
more or less taken as alone certain, as always the first
facts in the order of our life and consciousness. Thus,
a baby will be taken first to feel, know himself or
rather, his own feeling and knowing, and then gradually
to discover an outside world his mother's breast, his
nurse's hand, his cradle soft or hard, etc. all this
being really less certain (in itself, or at least for his
mind) than is his thus feeling, knowing himself. You
entirely follow?

Well, then, even more as to God the supersensible,
the Infinite He is pushed still farther back amongst
the late-acquired, the more or less doubtful "ideas,"
"notions," "perhapses." The regulative notions for
our conduct, the useful, more or less, working answer
to our real difficulties amongst our real facts. An
hypothesis, "it is useful to live as though there were a
God"? Kant's celebrated "als ob"? Conduct here
alone is quite certain; but then, too, conduct alone
entirely matters. Religion is here always directly
dependent upon, it is but the (really derivative,
though seemingly superior) sanction of morality. How
different is real life, and the spontaneous attitude of
all unsophisticated religion! In real life (all good

Letters to a Niece 13

psychologists and all careful theorists of knowledge
are coming to see it) there is from the first direct contact
with, direct knowledge of realities other than our-
selves. Light and air, plants, animals, fellow-humans,
the mother, the nurse: these are known together
with ourselves we never know ourselves except with i
and through those realities, and with and through our
knowledge of them. Indeed, it is them we know best
first; we know ourselves, at all adequately, only last
of all. This knowledge of other realities less than human
or simply human is never a knowledge through and
through it never simply equals the reality known.
But it is a real knowledge of these realities, as far as
it goes; realities which reveal their natures in their .
various self-manifestations. I know Puck as truly as !
Puck knows me; my knowledge does not merely
extend to appearances of him appearances hiding,
and probably travestying, his mysterious, simply
unknowable essence.

We thus certainly know other realities besides our
human reality (whether individual or even collective).
And mark you, if this very real knowledge of realities
not ourselves, always lags behind those realities as
they are in themselves: this knowledge, nevertheless, is \
(or can be] fuller than any complete and clear analysis of it
can ever be. Thus reality comes first; then knowledge of
it; then science of this knowledge.

What about God? Well, we must first of all become
clear to ourselves that, as with every degree and kind of
reality, we always apprehend Him only in, and with,
and on occasion of, yet also in contrast to, other
realities. Again, that this apprehension and sense of
God is (where not worked up and developed by the

14 Baron Von HtigeTs

great historical, institutional religions) very vague and
general, if taken as something statable in theoretical
terms. (Here again, then, is the difference between
knowledge and science!) Nevertheless, thus defined,
the religious sense exercises a prodigious influence. It
is the religious sense, even at this stage, where it seems
no more (on strict analysis) than a deep, delicate,
obstinate sense of otherness, of eternity, of prevenience,
of more than merely human beauty, truth, and
goodness, which really keeps our poor little human
world a-going. No great artist, no great philosopher
or scientist, no great ethical striver will ever fully,
consciously, and deliberately admit that what he
strives to paint, to sculpt, to compose, or to discover
or to understand, or to live and to be, is just human
so-and-so-ness, very possibly without any further
significance or truth about it whatsoever.

We have to be truthful, conscientious: why? Because
these are the dispositions for putting us into fuller
touch with realities of all sorts, especially with the
reality of God. Dispositions are the means to acquiring
reality towards knowing, loving, willing realities
greater than ourselves in which energisings we grow
in our own smaller reality.

When, then, Thekla says "religion has primarily
to do with is-ness not ought-ness," she means that
religion is essentially evidential; that it intimates,
first of all, that a superhuman world, a superhuman
reality is, exists. The first and central act of religion
is adoration, sense of God. His otherness though near-
ness, His distinctness from all finite beings, though not
separateness aloofness from them. If I cannot com-
pletely know even a daisy, still less can I ever completely

Letters to a Niece 15

know God. One of the councils of the Church launched
the anathema against all who should declare that
God is comprehensible. Yet God too, God in some
real sense especially, we can most really know, since
as does even the rose how much more He? Since He
deigns to reveal Himself to us. He does so in a two-
fold manner vaguely, but most powerfully in the
various laws and exigencies of life, and of our know-
ledge of it; and clearly, concretely, in and by the
historic manifestations in and through the great
geniuses and revealers of religion the prophets, and
especially Jesus Christ. These latter manifestations get
thoroughly learnt only in and through the various
historical religious bodies. It is through men trained
through and through in these schools of religion
that all the more solid and sane insights and habits,
even of the vague religion, get given most of the
point and steadiness which, as a matter of fact, they
possess.

4. There is not a line of all the above which has not
to be learnt in careful detail, in lowly practice, in
humble daily fight with self in docility and docility
on and on. We will gradually, ruminatingly, get the
whole unrolled before us. The all-important point
is, I think, at each step to feel how rich, how inex-
haustible, how live it all really is! That is why I am
trying to get such words as "Rome," "Athens," etc.
to mean a great rich world to you.

Gradually I shall give you more directly religious
books to ponder; yet, to the end, these should be made
to penetrate and purify a whole mass of not directly
religious material and life. God is the God of
Nature as of Grace, He provides the meal and the

1 6 Baron Von HugeTs

yeast. Let us act in accordance with this, His own
action.

AfFec. Uncle,

F. v. H.

EXTRACT FROM LETTER DATED 23 JANUARY, 1 919

I am sorry but not a bit surprised that you have
been finding Varro a bit dull even though he be
presented by Boissier, who assuredly is in no wise the
cause of this dullness. But I felt, Niece mine, that
I must thus risk, now and then, say once in ten times,
to give you something that will a bit bore you. No:
I felt something more and other than that. You see,
Niece, one reason why there are, as I think, so few
at all large, strong minds and characters about
nowadays, even in spite of the war, etc., is that
education, training of all sorts, religion even, have
been and are so largely pursued systematically as so
much beguilement, so much sheer kindergarten. The
dullness, the monotony, the hardness, the sheer trust
as to worthwhileness, the self-discipline, the asceticism:
all this is to count as old fogey-ness: and the result is?
Well, wayward childishness. At eighteen I made up
my mind to go into moral and religious training. The
great soul and mind who took me in hand a noble
Dominican warned me You want to grow in virtue,
to serve God, to love Christ? Well, you will grow in
and attain to these things if you will make them a
slow and sure, an utterly real, a mountain step-plod
and ascent, willing to have to camp for weeks or
months in spiritual desolation, darkness and empti-
ness at different stages in your march and growth.
All demand for constant light, for ever the best the

Letters to a Niece 1 7

best to your own feeling, all the attempt at eliminating
or minimising the cross and trial, is so much soft folly
and puerile trifling. And what Father Raymond
Kecking taught me as to spirituality is, of course,
also true in its way of all study worthy the name.
But L 'Opposition and the big and little Juvenal will,
I think, not bore you at all all the less as coming
from what did.

The Letters of the Younger Pliny.

These are truly silver literature, and without the
genius that stamps the work of his close friend Tacitus
as world-literature of the first rank. Yet how charming
they are ! How much I hope you will browse on these
utterly leisurely letters and learn much very much,
not only about the Roman character already so
pathetically but half, but a tenth part, aware of the
great light and life and love of Christianity but about
the human heart, the human soul what I aim at
after all as the end crown of your reading.

How wonderful in this way is his letter to Trajan
about the Christians how delightful all his relations
with that emperor, one of my dearest figures! How
impressive his account of the fall of Pompeii, and so
on and on!

You will read it all please, at least twice, with the
Life, etc., as well. I deeply regret that I have not been
able to find a translation of P.'s Panegyric of Trajan
that touching piece. I will continue to try for perhaps
a French rendering.

Your very afFec. old Uncle,

F. v. Hiigel.

Health, stationary still.

E

1 8 Baron Von Hitge/'s

13 VICARAGE GATE, KENSINGTON

My dear Gwen, 31 January, 1919.

Thank you much for your good letter. I sent you
this morning your new pagan Rome, packet five
volumes, all of which are presents, so there is nothing
even to come back this time.

Please attend to the following points:

1 . The Virgil is, you will see, simply the second, last
volume of the prose translation, and which you already
possess. . . .

Altogether I should love it, if you ended by reading
again and again all the first eight books of the ^Eneid;
certainly the culmination of Virgil's lovely genius;
the Sixth Book in particular has a mild splendour
unsurpassed in all human literature. On the other
hand I would counsel you against ever reading the
minor poems all given in this second volume. They
are all very slight affairs, certainly not by Virgil, and
quite unworthy of him. We have such grand other
things to get through, and so many of them we
will not waste our precious time over insignificant
trifles.

2. As to the Tacitus, I should wish you to do him
first amongst the books of the packet. And pray study
the minor writings first. I want you to read, very slowly,
ruminatingly, comparing part with part, etc., the
Dialogue of the Orators it will teach you lots as to the
strength and the weakness of this "silver age" Roman
education. Next, the Agricola this, like the Dialogue^
at least twice, looking up all the British places on the
map, and watching not only for interesting political
and military details, but also for touches of the char-

Letters to a Niece 19

acter of Agricola and of Tacitus himself both such
fine examples of the best Romans, who passed through
the Terror under Domitian, on to the "Indian
summer" of Rome's imperial times under Trajan,
Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius. At
least, this is true of Tacitus and of him only up to
and into the reign of Trajan upon the whole Rome's
happiest time during the four centuries of the Empire.
The Germania I always feel to be much less rich in
content than its two predecessors, still it is interesting,
especially again nowadays. Perhaps one careful reading
will be enough for this.

Only after all three minor writings and (of course)
the translator's Introduction to them, will you tackle
Tacitus's Histories. Please first carefully study the Intro-
duction, and use throughout very capitally clear maps
in the covers the maps in one volume whilst studying
the other volume. Thus you can have the maps open
before you all the time. But please note, not to force
yourself to get any very clear, very detailed concep-
tions as to the successive steps of the campaigns, etc.;
concentrate, on the contrary, on T.'s superb portraits
of characters, and his always noble, majestic ideals
and indignation. Even the vilest facts will not hurt
you, when thus lit up and all their grossness con-
sumed by this glorious soul's magnificent ardour. You
could carefully mark these passages, and could then
read these very carefully three times. Note, too, very
specially, the entire book concerning the Jewish War,
and Tacitus's pathetic misconception of the Jewish
religion, and of Christianity. This book is certainly
to be read twice. I believe now, after all, the Annals,
which were my former favourites, are less perfect than

2o Baron Yon HugeTs

these Histories. How I wish you knew Latin, to be able
to read Tacitus's magnificence in his own language!
Yet some of his splendour will reach you even in
the English.

I am gradually getting your next packet ready
it is planned as the last pagan Roman packet, and
will be, I hope and think, most valuable as a part
of your course it will lift up the Christian authors
in all sorts of ways. But, before then, you will care-
fully read, when Varro is mastered, also that charming
U Opposition sous les Cesars (Boissier) with those grand
Juvenal-Johnson poems.

What a fresh, further surprise and blotting-out of
old landmarks is this General Election! I must not
pretend to be other than very glad and relieved that
the Coalition has been strongly backed and settled in.
But three things in increasing order distress me. I feel
that we must somehow have Mr. Asquith in the House;
the returns by majorities of 8000 and 2000 respec-
tively of such unprincipled but most mischievous
wind-bags as Bottomley and Billings shows sadly
clearly the weak side of all democratic excitement;
and the sweeping victory of Sinn Fein, and with
actually that woman lunatic returned in Dublin,
shows still more clearly how little men are really
dominated only, or even chiefly, by reason; in very
large numbers, not by reason, but by passion a
very different thing!

My dear Gwen, I trust that even already you feel
what a support against such windy impulsions, against
such wild rootlessness, is the habitual living in a world
steeped in history, in knowledge of the human heart
your own, first and foremost, and, above all, in a

Letters to a Niece 21

sense of the presence, the power, the provenience of
God, the healing Divine Dwarfer of our poor little
man-centred, indeed even self-centred, scheme::. God
bless you, then, Niece, at and for the New Year,
very specially.

Loving Uncle,

Freddy.

Best wishes also to your Harry, and to Olivia,
Richard, and David.

13 VICARAGE GATE, KENSINGTON, W.8

My dearest Niece, 10 March, 1919.

You asked me in your last letter to write again soon;
and hence I do so, as to two points in your reading,
and in your mental habits generally, which I am con-
fident you will find of great advantage. I have myself
practised and tested these habits now for some thirty
years with very great fruit.

i. Whenever you study a book which is yours,
cultivate the habit of pencil-marking it, in a small
hand, with a sharp-pointed pencil, as follows: (i.) Use
the inner margins of the pages for references as to words,
phrases form generally; and the outer margins for
references as to persons, places, doctrines, facts and
things generally. You slightly underline, with a short
horizontal line, the word or words that strike you. If
they strike you as to form you put, on the inner margin,
at the corresponding height of the page, the number of
the other page or pages on which (before or after this
page) the same word or phrase occurs. If the passage
strikes you as to its content, you put on the outer margin

22 Baron Von Hugel's

the numbers of the other pages on which these contents
occur again. In fact, you form your book into a sort
of Reference Bible. Thus, for instance, in your Pliny
the Younger, any special garden arrangements, or
special points of his Bithynian administration, or
particulars as to the heathen cults or as to Chris-
tianity, would be thus marked and marginally anno-
tated with the numbers of the pages on which further
details as to these several things can be found. Note,
please, that for translations one only marks and refers
for things; and that only in originals (hence, with you,
only in books originally written in English or French)
will one have underlinings for both things and expres-
sions. Hence, Caesar, Tacitus, Pliny, etc., would only
have outer margin references. But Boissier, etc., would
have references also on the inner margins, just as
Shakespeare, etc., would have them.

Then, on the fly-leaves at the beginning of the books
that belong to you, I would, in short words of headings,
put down the points as to things that you specially
love, or have most learnt from, in the book, with the
numbers of the pages in which these several things are
discussed; and on the fly-leaves at the end of the same
book, I would similarly put down the things I have
not liked, that I object tp.

You would find that this twice double system of
annotation makes the reading sink ever so much more
lastingly into you, and that only thus can you readily
find again all the things that have specially helped you.

2. Strive hard (especially now you will be coming
to the directly Christian books) to attain one of two
possible frames of mind. It will be only if you can
manage to make the right frame of mind into your

Letters to a Niece 23

second nature, that you will deserve to grow in
insight, love and fruitfulness, my little Gwen.

(i.) You could try and force yourself to see, or to
pretend to yourself that you see, principles or con-
victions advanced by men holy or revered. Do nothing
of the kind: you would only lose your sincerity, you
would but prepare for yourself a dangerous reaction,
and you would not really thus come to see a single
step farther than you already see.

(ii.) Or (and this is, I think, for all of us the more
immediate fault) you could concentrate on your own,
present, explicit not-seeing of a thing, so as to decide
that it does not exist, or (at least) that it never can or
will be seen as true by yourself. This is doubtless the
chief reason why so few minds grow in their outlook
after, say, eighteen or twenty-one: they are so busy,
pompously affirming to themselves and others that
they don't and can't see this or that that this is not,
and that can't be as to harden down, for good and
all, into their narrow, stuffy little world. They thus
confuse two very distinct things sincerity concerning
the insight they have got, with striving to acquire
further, deeper, truer insight. It is, of course, profoundly
true that we get to see more and better by being very
faithful and very operative with regard to the light
we have. But, then, this fidelity and operativeness
should be very humble, very certain that there exist
oceans of reality of things and laws beautiful, true,
good and holy, beyond this our present insight and
operation. I so love to watch cows as they browse at
the borders, up against the hedges of fields. They move
along, with their great tongues drawing in just only
what they can assimilate; yes but without stopping

24 Ear on Von HUgel's

to snort defiantly against what does not thus suit them.
It is as though those creatures had the good sense to
realise that those plants which do not suit them
that these will be gladly used up by sheep, goats or
horses; indeed, that some of these plants may suit
them the cows themselves later on. So ought we
to do: not sniff and snort at what we do not under-
stand here and now; not proclaim, as though it were
a fact interesting to anyone but ourselves, that we do
not, here and now, understand this or that thing; but
we should just merely, quite quietly, let such things
stand over, as possibly very true, though to us they
look very foolish as indeed, possibly, things that we
ourselves will come to penetrate as true and rich indeed.
In a word, we can and should be sure of all that is
positive and fruitful for us in our outlook; sure, also,
that whatever really contradicts that is false. But as to
possible further truths and facts, we will leave ourselves
peacefully docile and open.

13 VICARAGE GATE, KENSINGTON, W.8

My most dear Gwen, 7 April, 1919.

Your letter has set me thinking re-thinking your
mind and soul, and how best quietly to feed and help
them. I wanted to write an answer on Saturday, and
then to-day. But my last four or five nights have been,
upon the whole, so bad that I dare not yet write
directly about your very important and delicate points,
since, when I am in such "en-comp6te" condition,
such letter-writing means further bad nights. I will
write as soon as I can. This is only a scribble, lest my

Letters to a Niece 25

silence were to end in making you fear indifference or
offendedness on my part neither of which would be
at all the case.

I wonder whether you realise a deep, great fact?
That souls all human souls are deeply intercon-
nected? That, I mean, we can not only pray for
each other, but suffer for each other? That these long,
trying wakings, that I was able to offer them to God
and to Christ for my Gwen- child that He might
ever strengthen, sweeten, steady her in her true,
simple, humble love and dependence upon Him?
Nothing is more real than this interconnection this
gracious power put by God Himself into the very
heart of our infirmities. And, my little Gwen, it is
the Church (which, improperly understood, "dumbs"
my little old, bewildered Child) it is the Church
which, at its best and deepest, is just that that inter-
dependence of all the broken and the meek, all the
self-oblivion, all the reaching-out to God and souls
which certainly "pins down" neither my child nor
this her old groping father which, if it "pins down"
at all, does so, really only even taken simply intel-
lectually as the skeleton "pins down" the flesh.
What a hideous thing the skeleton, taken separately,
is, isn't it? Yet even Cleopatra, when in the splendour
of her youth, she had such a very useful, very necessary,
quite unavoidable skeleton inside her, had she not?

But this will be better explained another time.
Meanwhile we will both breast the* waves, whether
sweet or bitter, looking not at them, but through
them on and up to God, our Peace.

26 'Baron Von Huge/'s

13 VICARAGE GATE, KENSINGTON, W.8

My very dear Gwen, 5 May, 1919.

Here I am writing to you, in your new temporary
home, looking out of your window, I expect, upon how
much of past history recorded in gloriously beautiful
monuments, poems in stone! And I am doing as my
first act (after an urgent business card), on this my
birthday, this my scribble to you. I am, dear, dear,
sixty-seven years old to-day! Thus, dear Child you
might almost be my granddaughter do I strive to
attain to the joy of Princess Colombe, in Browning's
touching play. You remember how she, Colombe,
had, up to her coming of age, always received countless
sumptuous presents and she had found only pleasure,
and less and less pleasure, in such receiving. So then
she settled she would receive no gifts at all on this,
the first day on which she could order her own life
in her own way; but she would herself give and give
and give. She felt that would bring not pleasure, but
joy, but beatitude. And so it did Colombe finishes
her day radiantly happy. So, then, sit on a footstool
here, by me, Daughter; and I will try and give you
not exterior things, but interior things things that
cost one a lot to get, a lot to keep. They are things,
indeed, that also cost one a good deal to give and
I can clearly tell you why, my Gwen. Look you, Dear:
there is simply nothing that one soul can transfer to
another soul even at these souls' best with" the
particular connotations, the particular experiences of
heart and heart, of blood and breeding, of sex and
age, etc., yet it is these particularities which incarnate
the convictions of any one soul for that one soul. Any

Letters to a Niece 27

one soul ean be fully impressive for another soul
only if that first soul comes out, to the second soul,
with its convictions clothed and coloured by those
its particularities. And yet the second soul, even if
thus impressed even if it thus wakes up to great
spiritual facts and laws, this second soul will at once,
quite spontaneously, most rightly, clothe and colour
these its new convictions with its own special qualities
and habits and experiences of thought, feeling, imagi-
nation, memory, volition; and so most really to try
and help on the life of another soul means, Dear, a
specially large double death to self on the part of the
life-bringing soul. For it means death to self before
and in the communication the life-bringing soul
must already, then, discriminate within itself between
the essence of what it has to say and the accidents,
the particularities, which clothe the utterance of this
essence; and it must peacefully anticipate the accept-
ance at most of that essence, and not of these accidents.
And then, after the communication, this soul must
be ready actually to back the other soul in the non-
acceptance even of the essence of the message, if there
is evidence that the other soul is not really helped,
but is hindered, at least for the time being, by this
essence now offered to it. And, as already said, at
best, only that essence can and should be taken over by
this other soul, and the light-bearing soul, even then,
must at once be busy helping the less experienced
soul to clothe the newly won essence in clothing from
the wardrobe of this other soul.

My Gwen, you see, this now, as follows, is the point
which, with the sendings of books which I begin to-
day, I hope you may end by seeing clearly, steadily,

28 Baron Von Hugel's

in your quite individual manner and degree. You
see, / see, how deep, and dear, how precious, is your
faith in God and in Christ. I thank God for them, and
if to the end you cannot acquire, without really
distracting or weakening that faith, a strong and
serene insight and instinct concerning the great
occasions and means by which those great faiths have
been, and are still conveyed to, and articulated and
steadied amongst mankind why, then, to the end,
I must, and will, actually defend you against the sheer
distraction of such instincts and insights not actually
possible to you. But it is plain that you would be a
much richer, wiser, more developed and more grateful
soul if you could and did permanently develop the
insights and instincts that I mean. And certainly the
things I am thinking of their perception con-
stitutes just the difference between a fully awake, a
fully educated mind, and a mind that is awake only
as to results, not as to the processes; as to what it
holds, and not as to who it is to whom it owes that it
has anything large and definite to hold at all.

You see, my Gwen, how vulgar, lumpy, material,
appear great lumps of camphor in a drawer; and
how ethereal seems the camphor smell all about in
the drawer. How delicious, too, is the sense of bounding
health, as one races along some down on a balmy
spring morning; and how utterly vulgar, rather
improper indeed, is the solid breakfast, are the pro-
cesses of digestion that went before! Yet the camphor
lumps, and the porridge, and its digestion, they had
their share, had they not? in the ethereal camphor
scent, in the bounding along upon that sunlit down?
And a person who would both enjoy camphor scent

Letters to a Niece 29

and disdain camphor lumps; a person who would
revel in that liberal open air and contemn porridge
and digestion: such a person would be ungrateful,
would she not? would have an unreal, a superfine
refinement? The institutional, the Church is, in
religion, especially in Christianity, the camphor lump,
the porridge, etc.; and the "detached" believers would
have no camphor scent, no open air, bounding liberty,
had there not been, from ancient times, those con-
crete, "heavy," "clumsy," "oppressive" things
lumps, porridge, Church.

There is, most certainly, a further difficulty in this
question. The Church, especially the Church in the
most definite sense, the Roman Catholic Church, has
at its worst done various kinds of harm, introduced
complications and oppressions which, but for it, would
not have been in the world. I know this in a detail
far beyond, my Gwen, what you will ever know. But,
my Dearie, let us keep our heads; and let us ask our-
selves, not whether "Church" of any kind does not
open the door to certain abuses special to itself, but,
primarily, only whether as a matter of fact it has not
been through the Church or Churches that Christianity
has been taught or practised; that Paganism has been
vanquished; that Gnosticism and Pantheism have not
carried all before them, long ago: whether indeed it
is not owing to the Church and Churches to the
organised, social, historical, institutional fact and
tradition, that the most independent-seeming, the
most directly inspired souls, do not draw a large part
of the purest of their conceptions. Thus George Fox,
the founder of the Quakers, taught that souls are
each and all directly taught by God, and have no

30 Baron Von HugeTs

need whatever of Churches, institutions, etc. all these
latter things are so much obstruction and incubus.
That he himself, at the end of two years of utter
aloofness from all men, was taught directly from
heaven (without any kind of previous initiation by
any human being) that Jesus is the Way, the Truth
and the Life; that God is Love; that to live is Christ
and to die is gain, etc., naively admits that, during all
that time, he had his Bible with him, reading, reading
it, all those twenty-four months. And how that, after
those entirely individual, entirely direct, utterly new
revelations, he did find teachings in St. John's Gospel
and Epistles, yes, not unlike his direct revelations;
but these revelations were in no way suggested by those
Bible passages, for these, Fox's revelations, were real,
were revelations from the living God to his, Fox's,
living soul and how can something living be sug-
gested by something dead? How can the Spirit be
tied to the letter? How can anything but God Himself,
and my own soul itself these two working and
responding directly in and to each other how can
or could they be otherwise than stopped or stifled by
anything not themselves by any person or thing
other than just themselves in this their unique
intercourse?

Now all this does not prevent Fox from having been
a very spiritual man, and his good faith is transparent.
Yet equally clear is the utter rottenness of his psycho-
logy and the childish simplicity of his conception as
to the methods actually employed by God. For those
beautiful thoughts, those great facts as to God and as
to Christ, were they less beautiful, less great because
they had been perceived and expressed already

Letters to a Niece 3 i

fifteen hundred and more years before Fox? And were
they less Fox's own, was he less free in uttering them,
because they had been awakened in himself, so utterly
freshly, by those lovers, thinkers and writers of the
past? Nor would it be adequate to reply: "Ah, well,
at least the individual Fox was awakened by, or on
occasion of, another individual, such two individuals
do not make a Church, still less does that one individual
(the Johannine writer) constitute a Church. " Such a
reply would be poor indeed. For the Fourth Gospel
is already a Church Document it already simply arti-
culates the faith and love of the Christian community
some sixty years after Our Lord's death. And even
the whole New Testament, or also the oldest parts,
even the unique life and love of Our Lord themselves;
even these again presuppose a Church, a community,
a tradition, etc., in which Jesus was brought up, and
which He learnt from and obeyed till He transcended
it, transforming and fulfilling all that was good in it.
You may ask, my Gwen Niece, what precisely I am
driving at? Do I want to make you a Roman Catholic?
Why, of course, no, Dear, I am busy, not with trying
to get you to turn actively "churchy" even. I am
hoping only to get you gradually to see the huge,
unique, irreplaceable good that you, as we all, owe
to the Church. Even if (which I hope may never
happen) you came to find it somehow impossible to
keep up as much of Church practice (Holy Com-
munion, etc.) as, thank God, you practise now: even
then you would (if I succeed) feel a deep, deep grati-
tude to the Church something like to, though con-
siderably more than, you will come to feel towards
ancient Rome and ancient Greece. Want of such

32 Baron Von Hugel's

insight and such gratitude towards any of these forces
constitutes always, I am sure, a very real limit and
weakness.

Farther back, I said that the main point to consider
was, not the harm done by churchmen at their worst,
but the special function and work of the Church at its
best. You see, Gwen, this is but the same principle
which comes continually into everything. Take mar-
riage. What a unique means of training the soul,
how magnificent is its ideal! Yes, but nothing is, of
course, easier than to collect volumes full of instances
of infidelity, tyranny, non-suitedness, etc. A good
lawyer-philanthropist friend of mine has enthusias-
tically put forward the example of certain American
states which allow sixteen valid reasons for divorce.

Take parenthood : what a unique relation, what an
irreplaceable means for the mind's and soul's growth.
Yes, but the volumes full of misguided parental
affection or folly or tyranny! So with the State, so with
Art, so with Science, so with all that the hands of men
touch at all hands which so readily soil even what
they most need, what is most sacred. But notice how
Church, State, Family, Children, the Marriage Tie,
these, and other right and good things, not only
possess each its Ideal, unattained outside of and
above it. No, no: they each possess within them more
or less of that Ideal become real they each and all live
on at all because, at bottom, they are necessary, they
are good, they come from God and lead to Him, and
really in part effect what they were made for.

Now the four sendings of books, beginning with this
one, will specially invite you to note the action of the
Church within the Roman Empire. The present five volumes

Letters to a Niece 33

deal with the Church's Triumph over Paganism ; the next
batch will deal with the Church's Triumph over Gnosticism ;
and the last two batches will deal with the hermits,
monks, and three or four of the largest minds amongst
the Roman Empire Christians.
As to this batch, read, my Dear, as follows:

1. Wiseman's Fabiola (a gift). The parts descriptive
of the Catacombs, Christian rites, etc., two or three
times.

2. Allard's Persecutions, vol. i. The Acts themselves
two or three times the rest at least once.

3. Prudentius's Cathemerinon. I hope you will care
to learn some of these hymns, so full still of the sense
of all that Christianity had cost, and of how it was
worth, oh, all that and much more besides 1

And 4. Then Allard's Persecutions, vols. iv. and v.
Allard will thus give you the beginning and the end of
those centuries of persecution. I hope that the Pru-
dentius break will prevent the Allard affecting you
too much. You will sincerely tell me how it all goes.

I trust the Salisbury time will refresh and rest you,
my Gwen Niece. Kind regards to Miss Edith Olivier,
with whom I used to have good walks and talks
in Wilton.

13 VICARAGE GATE, KENSINGTON

6 May, 1919.

Your post card just come, crossing a long letter and
five books from -me. I did not, in fact, explain in that
letter the following: (i) The Fabiola book, though not
actually great, is yet a thoroughly useful thing: it

34 Baron Von Hugel's

was written after many years' frequentation of the
Catacombs, and much living in that early Christian
world. And it is thoroughly readable witness its
translation into thirteen different languages. The
Allard volumes are very sincere, reliable, first-hand
work better far than anything in English on the
same subject. I do hope you will love Saints Felicitas
and Perpetua the sweet virility, the tender strength
of them! The Prudentius is, I believe, well done.
Prudentius is no genius like Lucretius or like Virgil,
but Prudentius is possessed by an insight and by
facts far, far deeper than Lucretius or Virgil ever
grasped. And he breathes a rich, utterly unsentimental
peace because a peace after and in struggle, suffering,
self-oblivion.

Getting out all fine days now.

Uncle H.

13 VICARAGE GATE, KENSINGTON

My dear Gwen, 8 May, 1919.

Many thanks for little letter acknowledging the
Persecutions books and my long outpourings as to
Church.

My post card will have reached you later. I shall
love in due course to hear all your impressions as pat
and fat as you can make them. But this has nothing
to do with all that. It simply wants to tell you that
we leave this for kind Cousin Evelyn de Vescis,
Clonboy, Englefield Green on Thursday and stay
there possibly till September and that we much hope
you will be able to manage a full week with us there.
In this I would read aloud to you, say, Browning's

Letters to a Niece 35

great Ring and the Book or some other amongst those
I want you to know, that you may happen not to have
read so far. And we could have thorough, easy, all-
round talks in that pretty Surrey garden.

P.S. Delighted you like Tertullian! Mind you read the
"Apology" very carefully also the "Testimony of the
Christian Soul. " But indeed all the treatises translated
in that "Library of the Fathers" volume are studded
with jems of thought, faith, love of the purest water.

13 VICARAGE GATE, KENSINGTON

14 May, 1919.

This, my dear Gwen, is only to say two little
immediately practical things. . . .

(2) I am delighted at your going to listen for three
days to Edward Talbot, whom indeed I know, and
whom I like and trust very truly. He will be able to
put before you a large, fine amount of that really
unlimited experience, wisdom, practicality, gained and
transmitted by the Christian Church. You will gain
much if you go simply without a touch of captiousness
leaving quietly what does not help using gratefully
whatever may, upon prayerful reflection, really help.

Pray for me there and always, Niece mine.

H.

GLONBOY, ENGLEFIELD GREEN, SURREY

My most dear Niece, 12 June, 1919.

I have been revolving your letter its points in my
old head and heart, and the following is the upshot.
I begin with the books and end with direct life.

36 Baron Von

1. I am glad you have read Paradise Lost, and still
more glad that you do not like it. Rabindranath
Tagore, at Vicarage Gate, told me that all his life
he had wondered why Englishmen considered Milton
a poet at all; for that to be a poet is not, primarily,
to have a keen sense for poetical forms, but to be
penetrated by a love of all things good in Nature, as
vehicles and presentations of the spiritual realities
that an innocent sensuousness is a sine qua non for all
real poetry. But that Milton is, in his heart of hearts,
doubly cold, doubly hostile, to Nature good Nature.
That he is incurably a Puritan; and then has also
taken over the cold side of the Renaissance. I think
myself that you are more just than Tagore, and that
those exquisite early and short pieces are true poetry,
are innocently sensuous. I feel the same with Lycidas
and Comus. But Tagore is right as to the poet in
Paradise Lost all but grand bits, such as the invocation
of light, his blindness, the description of Eve in
Paradise, etc. The fact is that Puritanism is neither
natural (in the good sense) nor (really) Christian.

2. As to Shakespeare, he is, indeed, an utter marvel
of richness. But in Shakespeare I always end by
feeling a limit in a way the very contrary to Milton's
limit yet a grave limit still. Shakespeare is a true
child of the Renaissance also in the Renaissance's
limitation. He has not got that sense not merely of
life's mystery, etc. but of the supernatural, of the
other Life, of God, our Thirst and our Home he has
not got what Browning on these points has so
magnificently. No dying figure in Shakespeare looks

forward', they all look backward; none thirst for the
otherness of God, they all enjoy, or suffer in, and with,

Letters to a Niece 37

and for, the visible, or at least the immanent, alone.
When the soul is fully awake, this is not enough; it
only arouses, or expresses, man's middle depths, not
his deepest depths. It is not anti-Christian; it is even
Christian more Christian, really, than Milton as far
as it gets; but it does not reach the ultimate depths, it
never utters the full Christian paradox and poignancy.

3. As to the Martyrs, I well understand, Dear, that
you have had enough of them, at least for the present,
yet I do not regret sending you the Allard. I am
profoundly convinced that we can never be impressed
too much by the reality, the transforming, triumphing
power of religion by the immense factualness. And
for the purpose, I know nothing more massively
impressive than those first three centuries of perse-
cution. But it is literature, doubtless, more for a
mature or elderly man, rather than for a young woman.
And you will be able to feed the astringent emotions
(alongside of the sweet) in other ways. This, of course,
means that I hold these astringent emotions and
moods this apparent hardness, this combat and
concentration, this asceticism, to be, in the right
place and proportion, an absolutely essential con-
stituent of the Christian outlook. Of course, a child
can and ought to have only a very little, and a peculiar
kind of it; a woman ought to find and to foster a form
and amount of it, different from a man's needs. But
where this element is not, there is not authentic
Christianity, but some sentimental humanitarianism,
or some other weakening inadequacy. By all means
return now, to Vicarage Gate, the three Allard
volumes.

4. I had got you your next parcel made up of books

38 Baron Von Hu gel's

about Gnosticism and the Church's immortal victory
in the first two centuries over that many-headed
monster, so live again amongst us. I had got passages
from the chief Gnostics for you in English; such
Pagan Magic writers and attempters of a Gnostic-
Magic substitute for Christianity as Apuleius and
Philostratus (Life of Apollonius of Tjana). And I had
finished up with Ibsen's grand, little-known play
picturing these last attempts for those times of
Paganism in competition with Christianity. I had all
this ready, again, to bring home the reality, the
irreplaceableness, of Christianity; and to protect you,
through the self-expansion we can attain by history,
from the Esoteric Buddhists, the Spiritualists, etc.
The Gnostics of our day, very small descendants of
those ancient Gnostics, who, bigger though they were,
could not prevail in the fierce testing of human life.

But I see you are hungering now, not for the know-
ledge of things to avoid, but for the further revelation
of realities to love. And so I am putting this Gnostic
packet away for the present. I will take it when we
have done the Pagan and Christian Greek things; as
a matter of fact, Gnosticism was primarily Greek,
though it broke out as a spiritual epidemic, at its
worst, in the late Roman Empire.

5. I send you instead, by Hillie for two nights at
Vicarage Gate, the following four books two gifts
and two loans. Pray read them in the following order,
and with the precautions and considerations I shall
now propose.

(i.) The Octavius of Minucius Felix.

I think this is the finest Latin Christian pre-Con-

Letters to a Niece 39

stantinian document, as so much literature. It is touching
and helpful also spiritually; but as to depth and power,
there exist greater things in that range of documents,
e.g. Tertullian. But then Tertullian is disfigured with
every kind of vehemence, want of proportion, bad
taste in details, sometimes even in great things.
Whereas Minucius Felix is so beautiful throughout
his form, that Boissier loves him for it. You remember
Boissier's fine analysis of the Octavius? Read, then,
this short piece, very carefully, ruminatingly, at least
twice the Introduction first of all, and at the end
of the second reading.

(ii.) Turmel's Tertullien.

Tunnel is an excellent initiator into Tertullian, and
will give you, I think, a vivid sense of what a genius,
what a dazzling variety, what a harshness and impossi-
bleness that poor great mind, that vehement, burning
and largely burnt up soul, was in real life, and is still
in his very difficult, largely repulsive, but astonishingly
live books, still. You will never forget, will you, Gwen,
that Rome that official Christianity deliberately and
continually refused to accept Tertullian's tone, or to
endorse his Rigorism? He ranks as the greatest of the
Montanist heretics. And most undoubtedly Rome was
right in all this, and Tertullian was wrong. Yet it
remains simultaneously true, that Tertullian's is the
first mind and personality of the first rank, classable
as Christian, indeed heroically Christian in intention,
that God gave or permitted to mankind, after the long
break since St. Paul. Our Lord, the Unmatched, the
Inexhaustible God with us, surrounded by little,
little men. And then, promptly, one great follower,

Baron Von HugeTs

St. Paul. And then a long break, followed by a second
great follower, Tertullian. And then a shorter break,
and a third great, indeed a still greater, a far mellower,
a far more fully Christianised Christian man, St. Augus-
tine. You will at first hate Tertullian as much as the
Milton of Paradise Lost perhaps. Tertullian, a lawyer
by training, and a hard, fierce, African Roman by
temperament with all the tendency to excessive
reaction and vigilant rigorism of most converts
especially of converts from the moral corruptions of
that late Paganism, can seem can be along certain
of his most numerous sides as legalistic, as mercenary,
as cold, etc., as Milton. Yet all this, surrounded by so
much more, and the whole as part of a personality
full of vehement exuberance a personality which,
though it can shout unjust reproaches and apparent
arrogances, is, at bottom, pathetic in the sense of its
own unloveliness so in his little treatise on Patience,
a virtue, he confesses at starting, which he, the vehe-
ment, the turbulent, never possessed. Please note,
too, that Tertullian stands quite unique in the way he
has always been treated by the official Church. A
man once declared a heretic, and his writings were
shunned by all but a few orthodox scholars, and his
writings would never be used with admiration and for
acceptance. But Tertullian was taken by St. Cyprian
as his, the bishop's, daily spiritual reading; and, indeed,
St. Cyprian's own writings are full of reminiscences of
those of Tertullian. And even in our recent times
upon the whole more strict amongst the orthodox
than were those earlier centuries this same privileged
treatment remains: there exists, e.g., a three-volume
Selections from Tertullian, made ready for sermons

Letters to a Niece 41

throughout the Sundays and holidays of the year:
this by a French priest in the forties or fifties, with
full episcopal approbation. Why has Tertullian always
enjoyed this quite exceptional treatment? It is, I think,
not so much because he was the first to coin a whole
string of striking technical terms, which were taken
over permanently by Christian, especially by Latin
Christian theology, but because Tertullian's errors
were mostly excesses in opposition to the natural, the
first impulses of the average man or woman thus
these errors were, upon the whole, harmless.

(iii.) Tertullian, English translations of some of his
chief writings, in the "Library of the Fathers," vol. i.

Although Tunnel will already have given you well-
chosen, well-translated extracts from Tertullian, I
should like you to read, in this (very fine) English trans-
lation, the great "Apologeticus" so amazingly rich in
vivid pictures and in vehement emotions and the beau-
tiful, deep "Testimony of the Christian Soul." I have
deliberately withheld from the packet a good English
translation of the "Testimony of the Martyrs" and
(again) of his "Testimony of the Christian Soul" a
little volume like the Minucius Felix. I have so acted
because I do not want to give you a second Tertullian
volume, unless and until I find that you are more helped
than repelled by the fierce African. Of one thing I am
sure: no one can get much out of Tertullian unless the
person, man or woman, be thoroughly self-disciplined,
self-trained in the fruitful art and virtue of gathering
roses amidst thorns, and of discerning jewel eyes in a
toad's head. I want my niece to end by becoming such
a discriminator; how weary I am of the lumpers, the

42 Baron Von Hilgel's

whole-hoggersl I will not press you, over the Tertullians,
as to the amount of reading of him. You may find
even a single reading of the Turmel volume, as of the
"Apologeticus" and "Christian Soul" in the "Library
of the Fathers" volume, more than you can stand.
Or again you may discover refreshing oases in that
scorching desert, and may be drawn on by a genius,
as certainly a genius as he requires bucketsful of
expansion and of sweetness to render useful and
palatable even thimblesful of his rigidity and bitter-
ness. If you are thus fascinated, a double reading of
Turmel, and a double reading of the English volume
(at least of the two pieces proposed) would certainly
not be too much.

(iv.) Palladius, Lansiac History of the Early Monks.

Gwen will think that her old Uncle has never done
with astringency! My Gwen: just only you get inside
any one of the deeper and deepest men souls, when fully
awakened by grace, and you will perhaps marvel at,
you will certainly have to note, the large presence in
very various forms, no doubt of such astringency, so
if it be only to understand the history of men's souls,
a considerable acquaintance with such pickles and
prickles, such salt and such mustard, is necessary.
Besides, as to this Palladius book in particular, it
admirably balances and completes your outlook upon
dying Paganism and upspringing Christianity in the
decadent Roman Empire. Also, you can hardly under-
stand well the St. Jerome and the St. Augustine
volumes, of the packet to follow, unless you know some-
thing about St. Anthony and his companions. I shall
be interested to hear whether my little old Gwen

Letters to a Niece 43

manages to discern, in these often strange scenes, a
necessary, abiding element (capable of all sorts of
forms and of degrees) of Christianity itself. There is
still a strange (at bottom childish) intolerance abroad
as to the ascetical element; but men the deeper ones
are again coming to see what they had far better
never ceased to see so Professor William James, so
too Professor Ernst Troeltsch both men of the largest
outlook. If you like Palladius, read him twice; if
you don't, put him by till you can appreciate him,
Dear.

6. As to the worldliness well, yes, my Gwen, it
is a thoroughly vulgar thing, especially when we
remember the regal call of our souls. You know and
you feel this; and you have only to try and to do
better and better to fail, in this respect, less and less
often, less and less fully. There is, however, one
consolation about this worldliness is a less dangerous
foe of the spiritual life than is brooding and self-
occupation of the wrong, weakening sort. Nothing
ousts the sense of God's presence so thoroughly as
the soul's dialogues with itself when these are grum-
blings, grievances, etc. But, of course, the ideal is
to do without either worldliness or brooding. I say all
this, whilst confident that you do not class a right
amount of (and kind of) sociability and of pleasure
in it, as worldliness. Of course such social activity
and pleasure is right, and indeed a duty and a help
to God.

7. I love to think of the happy times you have had
in Westminster Cathedral and now in Salisbury
Cathedral. I take it that God in His goodness has
granted you the simple Prayer of Quiet or, at least,

44 Baron Von Hilgel's

that you get given touches, short dawns, of it, now
and then. You know, dear, how much and often
I insist with you on the visible, the historical, the
social, the institutional. But this is done without even
the temptation to doubt, or to treat lightly, moments
of formless prayer. Such formless prayer, where genuine,
is, on the contrary, a deep grace, a darling force and
still joy for the soul. May you have, and keep, and grow
in this grace! What are the tests, the conditions of
this genuineness? They are two. Such prayer may
never become the soul's only form of prayer; formal,
vocal or mental prayer the reciting of e.g. the Our
Father, the Glory be to the Father, Acts of Faith,
Hope, Love, Contrition (as in the prayer-books or
made up by oneself) prayers, all these, we can give
an account of when we have done them: such prayers
must never completely cease. And such formless prayer
is the right sort if, in coming away from it, you find
yourself humbler, sweeter, more patient, more ready
to suffer, more loving (in effect even more than in
affection) towards God and man; given the first
(precaution) and this second (result) you cannot well
have too much of this prayer. And I think God will
lead you much along this path; and that you will
get beyond the worldliness, and other faults, especially
through it. For you will get to love it so; and it will
grow or will intermit, in proportion as you are faithful
in turning away from self. A homely heroism will
feed this prayer of speechless love; and the speechless
love will feed the homely heroism.

Letters to a Niece 45

CLONBOY, ENGLEFIELD GREEN, SURREY

My darling Gwen-Child, 3 July, 1919.

Your two letters about the Canterbury Retreat
were, and are, a deep satisfaction and joy to get and
to ponder over; only our having three friends staying
here, and my nights having, anyhow, become bad
from doing too much, have kept me from writing at
once. And even now I feel I had better not embark on
your big learned questions gnosticism and earthly
progress, but I had better merely give you some
impressions and suggestions directly connected with
the effects of that Retreat or with the details of your
coming here.

1. As to your visit here . . .

2. As to Ring and the Book, I had not realised the very
happy fact that you knew it well already you shall
have the book from me here, but I think we had better
not do more with it than just compare our choice of
finest pieces. For I want to use these few precious
hours to start you in St. Augustine in his Confessions.
I have two precisely similar copies ready for this
meeting; so you can follow in jour copy what I shall
read out to you from mine. I think this may well be
the best way for you to begin St. Augustine, to do so
with one who has tried to live the Confessions at
their deepest these last fifty years so stop till Thursday,
Dear!

3. I so well understand both your deep helpedness
by Edward Talbot and by the services; and, again,
the dullness of the lectures on St. Francis of Assisi
(entrancing subject though this be!), and your longing
to get away from all that ladies' chatter. As to this

46 Baron Von Hilgefs

latter, it almost looks as if you had no rule of silence
(entire, or with but a break of an hour a day, say) .
Yet this is a point so obvious and so important, that
I expect you did have silence, but only that the ladies,
even so, managed, over questions or the like, to get in
much dissipating chatter. Certain it is that at no time
is overmuch talking compatible with spiritual growth;
to learn interior silence, the not talking to self our
little notions petted as our own, etc. is fundamental
in the attaining of the spiritual life.

4. I especially understand the genuine, even great
pain that growth caused you, Gwen. A very good
sign. Truly, you understand, and will cultivate the
knowledge, of two facts or laws, Dear, won't you?
The first is that our ideal must be, in and for the
long run a genial, gentle, leisurely expansion no
shaking of the nerves, no strain, no semi-physical
vehemence, no impatient concentration suffering and
(involuntary) strain may come to us; but all this will,
where good, be upborne and expanded into peace
and humble power, if we keep little in our own eyes,
gently watchful, and united to God in love. The
second fact or law is that nothing we may feel,
think, will, imagine, however spiritual, however real
spiritually, but has, in this our earthly lot, to be paid
for in the body. True, the joy of it will even do our
body good: still a certain subtle, unintentional strain
has been introduced into our nervous system. The
same, in its degree and way, would be true, if we took
systematically to music or to mathematics. There is
no necessary harm in this, and no means of fully
avoiding it. Yet, it is important we should be aware
of the fact. For such awareness will help to give us

Letters to a Niece 47

a certain sobriety and moderation in all this our
emotional life a sobriety and moderation which will,
if wisely managed, greatly add to and aid that fun-
damental Christian virtue creatureliness.

5. And lastly consolation^ Dear, is sooner or later
followed by Desolation ; and the latter is, when and
where God sends it, and we have not ourselves brought
it on ourselves by laxness and dissipation, as true a
way to God, and usually a safer one, than consolation.
Day and night, sunshine and storm, union and alone-
ness both are necessary, sooner or later, Sweet. But,
of course, it is for God, for Him alone, to leave and
to apportion these vicissitudes to each soul. And
certain it is that it is of much help to have some older,
more experienced soul handy also, who can and will,
if and when we get into Desolation, cheer us on, by
the reminder of the former consolation, and still more
by the great fact that only through such vicissitudes
through fidelity in them can we grow strong and
deep in God and for Him.

Loving old,

Uncle.

CLONBOY, ENGLEFIELD GREEN

My darling Niece, 5 July, 1919.

As to Traherne, Vaughan, Crashaw (I add Herbert
and Donne), I think they all contain much spiritual
food one could easily make one's spiritual reading
for several years of them, if their form became bearable
for long and extensively to one. Also there are single
poems (e.g. Vaughan's "They are all gone into a
world of light," and Herbert's "Sweet day, so cool,

48 Baron Von Huge/'s

so calm, so bright") which are perfect, indeed magnifi-
cent or exquisite even qua poems. Yet the bulk of the
poetical work of all five seems to me hopelessly dis-
figured as to form by their quasi-perpetual straining
after some conceit, some play upon thought when
that thought's seriousness demands, in good taste, the
greatest possible directness, sobriety, simplicity; yet
again, if one compares them with real religious
English poetry, such as Keble, one finds, I think,
that they contain more sheer poetry than Keble. They
are more virile, somehow; I was sorry, in my last
letter, that I did not make a point of your ever dear,
fine father. Nothing could be more deserved than that
the thought of him should have been specially with
you in Canterbury; had he been frivolous and narrow-
hearted you might never have come to much!

Loving Uncle-Father.

CLONBOY, ENGLEFIELD GREEN, SURREY

From letter of 7 August, 1919.
My darling Gwen,

i. St. Augustine. I cannot exaggerate the gain
that I think you will derive from feeding for years
upon the Confessions. They, more than any other book
excepting the Gospels and the Psalms, have taught
me and I believe they will teach you, will penetrate
and will colour every tissue of your mind and heart
as to four things especially.

(i.) Seriousness. The average, conventional, latter-
day, enlightened, etc., outlook as to moral respon-
sibility, purity, humility, sin, is just so much childish-

Letters to a Niece 49

ness compared to the spirit that breathes in those
deathless pages. That entire way of recording one's
own or other lives, as though they were just so many
crystals, or at most so many plants; as though they
could not, in the given circumstances, have been
other than in fact they were: all that sorry naturalism
and determinism, with its cheap self-exculpation and
its shallow praise (because also shallow blame) of
others: all this is nobly outsoared, is obviously nowhere,
in that deep manly world of St. Augustine.

(2.) Reality, Distinctness , Prevenience of God, our Home.
This again, how little we are recognising it! And how
this fundamental fact pervades St. Augustine! It is be-
cause of this mighty fact (2) that fact (i) ever taken in
all its seriousness, leaves the soul rock-based, serene, un-
shaken; even though it wander far away from God, its
Home. Yet that Home continues ready to receive it back.

(iii.) The Church, the Community, the Tradition, the
Training School of Seekers after, of Souls found by God
and Christ. This great fact, overlooked nowadays as
fact, and the other two St. Augustine had them all
three in deepest operation each requiring, supple-
menting, strengthening the other.

(iv.) Our Dead ourselves when dead. St. Augustine is
the finest antidote to our prevalent weakness here
again. What soul ever owed more to another than
Augustine to Monica? Can there have been many
souls more holy than Monica's? And have there been
many come back from more deadly sins and errors
than Augustine? Yet with all she was, with all her
saintly life and glorious death, all still vividly before
him, Augustine quietly records her frailties and prays

50 Baron Von H tigers

for her, and begs all who read him throughout the
ages to pray for her, for the forgiveness of her sins.
In this way even Monica becomes, if I may speak in
homely fashion, not a lobster-pot, but a springboard,
not a blind-alley or a terminus, but a starting-point
and a spur to seeing, willing, doing even further than
her, further than her whilst she was in this life.

2. God. I shall be glad if on this point you can and
will develop two distinct currents of conviction and
emotion: the two together will give you a deep growing
faith. By all means concentrate upon the lights that
may come to you, as it were incidentally, and as
background, in and through your prayers of Church
services, Prayer of Quiet and Holy Communions; and
leave alone definitions of Him, and clear, reasoned
articulations of your faith in, of your conceptions of
Him. Good, excellent provided you not only respect
for others, but you interiorly reverence as indirectly
but most operatively necessary for yourself, the great
positive conclusions of the greatest thinkers, theo-
logians, saints, the great definitions of the Church
concerning God. I mean learn to shrink away from
the childish attitude of Schiller, in his epigram that
he refuses to belong to any religion, because of his
profound religiousness, or of Goethe in his Faust that
it does not matter what we think God to be, what we
say of Him that it all equally affirms and equally
denies Him. I cannot exhaustively know, I cannot
adequately define, even a daisy, still less Puck. Still
less you. Does it follow that I cannot know, in various
degrees, really know, a daisy, Puck you that it does
not matter how I conceive them, that this conception
is not ever so much more penetrating, ever so much

Letters to a Niece 5 i

more true, than is that conception? You know Gibbon's
far too influential gibe at the Arian Controversy that
it was all a silly squabble concerning a diphthong
as to whether Christ was Homo susios same substance
with the Father or Homo sousios of similar substance
with the Father. Gibbon thus confounded rich, far-
reaching live differences, with their ultimate reduction
to technical terms. You might as well declare that a
controversy turning upon one million pounds sterling
that presence or absence was but a wrangle over
the numerical sign the vertical stroke of i. Since,
on the one side, men wrangled "000,000" and, on
the other side, men wrangled " 1,000,000." Of course
all great issues can intellectually be reduced to such
beggarly-seeming symbols; and in this reduced form
they can only appeal to those who know them in their
living fullness and operativeness. But it is a transparent
piece of claptrap to decide off-hand, from such reduc-
tions, that this or that one is worthy of all respect
because it covers great riches of fact, and that another
deserves all contempt as a mere empty formula. My
Child will then just simply love and serve God in and
through her prayers, her joys, her sufferings her
Church and her Communions her children and her
dear ones all but she will not tilt at, she will not treat
lightly definitions, however dry-seeming and abstract.

Two great laws I am convinced they are of and
in our little earthly lives and probation. The one
fact and law is, how unequipped are young people,
say up to thirty at the earliest, for any final negative
decision as to religion. I mean definite, institutional
religion; and therefore how heavy is the responsibility

>

52 Baron Von Hugel's

of parents and seniors if they provoke, if they give
ready occasion to, the young to any indiscriminate
revolt against such definite institutional religion. Such
seniors may have the deepest experience of what such
definite, institutional religion means in and for their
own lives, but they ought simultaneously to make
clear to themselves that this their own formed con-
viction has been an affair of time, and that they must
not presuppose it as extant in the young, or as simply
transferable to the young by command or even by
careful teaching. This, of course, in no wise means
that children and young people should not be taught
some religion, should not be wisely trained in some
religious (institutional religious) convictions and habits.
It only means that at every step you should remain
conscious of the inevitable, the right of difference
between these young things and yourself and that
we will have gained a great point if they leave your
hands with only a little definite religion, but with a
sense that there may well be more in it than they can,
so far, see for themselves.

The second great fact or law of human life is that
good faith and the effects of our view and decisions
(upon ourselves and others) are strikingly incom-
mensurate. A child is taken over a factory in the
best good faith it puts its hand into the machinery
its good faith in no wise saves it from its own quite
sincere but entirely ignorant action. No doubt that
in more purely spiritual and moral matters, good
faith does more or less neutralise some of the effects
of inexperience, precipitation, etc. but it does not
neutralise them entirely. All this then means that we
will strive to make the young feel more and more

Letters to a Niece 53

that sincerity is indeed a one most necessary virtue for
them; but that docility is quite as necessary a virtue.

Your father exemplified this so grandly in music
the subject-matter of his special genius: he was not
at all merely himself and sincere there; but for years
he kept himself at school under Dannreuther, and to
the hour of his death he was definitely learning from
Bach and Beethoven, Wagner was continuing en-
riched and enriching a great articulate and increasingly
articulated tradition. Indeed, also in religion, I love
to remember how religiously-tempered he ever re-
mained how nobly he overflowed and left behind
him in his actual love and interests, such books as Buckle's,
which, nevertheless (owing to that early, never directly
revised inhibition and depletion), he never ceased
from, now and then, praising to me. It was doubtless
his most beautiful purity and love of young souls that
thus kept him from being himself centrally determined
by those brilliant materialists. And then, my Gwen
I look, not back, but onwards not to what he was
(even at his darling best), but to what he is, is in the
true full life which assuredly he has already gained,
or is in process of gaining.

My darling Niece-Daughter! I feel I know you, and
God's purifications of you, much better since you were
here those darling days. And I feel, as I felt at the
moment you told me of a big, piercing fact, that you
have all the materials ready to your hand of down-
right holiness. Oh, how kind and generous of God when
He makes it impossible for us to become very happy
unless we become very good. Bless you, Child. Pray for
this old thing. I pray for you and the three.

H.

54 Baron Von HilgeFs

CLONBOY, ENGLEFIELD GREEN, SURREY

My darling Gwen-Child, 18 August, 1919.

I am always so glad when you can and do articulate
some perplexity about one or other of the huge, rich,
many-sided not questions, but facts and laws which
I try to help you to see for thus I feel on sure ground
not only as to those great facts; but also as to your
whereabouts, or your obscurity, concerning them.

I do not any more remember my exact object in
telling what you have evidently remembered very
accurately; but I will now take the point in (and
more or less by) itself, and will make it as clear as
ever I can.

You see, my Gwen, that with the all but limitless
sway of subjectivism, especially since the eighteenth
century, almost everyone nowadays, who is not
deeply fed and filled by quite definite religious
(institutional religious) life and convictions, thinks,
if they think of truth and fact at all, of things not
given, not found, but as things somehow projected, or
created, by us (and this, all within and only for the
purpose of our human nature and human limitedly human
certainties and happiness). Strictly speaking, such an
attitude should never speak of truth as in any sense
ultimate and independent of ourselves; or of any reality
as certainly existing prior to, and independently of,
our affirmations of it. Such a temper of mind, if it
talks of Church, of Christ, of God at all, can only
talk of them as just so many "beautiful" or "interest-
ing" ideas within your and my brain and heart as
things possibly without any reality outside of these
receptacles. Such people could not ever raise the

Letters to a Niece 55

question as to whether all three facts and realities (as you
and I hold them to be) themselves communicate themselves
to man themselves invade his consciousness, provided such
consciousness is pure and sincere. This question, note,
Dear, is distinct from the question as to whether or
not Church, Christ, God, are all three true, all three
real. The Roman Catholic Church any and every
Christian group or individual who would deny, or
even discriminate between, the truth, the reality, of
any one of the three, would stultify itself or himself.
God leads to Christ, and Christ leads to Church;
and, inversely, the Church leads to Christ, and Christ
leads to God. Or, better, the Church always involves
Christ, and Christ always involves God; and God
always involves Christ, and Christ always involves
the Church. This, Dearie, is clear enough, isn't it?
But 'please note (not as contradictory to this, but
different to this) that when we speak thus we are
speaking of the complete interconnection, the com-
plete three-mountains-chain, as God always sees it,
or some human souls here below always see it; as it
is in itself, whether many or few, all or no, human souls
see it. We are not speaking as (in this world of slow
growth, of complications, and of trial, of weakness,
cowardice and sin) the situation actually stands. Every-
where in this little "cabined" life of man we have
to introduce a similar distinction between the com-
plete type, as most certainly willed by God, most
certainly planned by Him, and effected again and
again by and with His help; and the incomplete, the
merely inchoate individuals always in all ranks of
actual life the considerable majority. I believe only
5 per cent of most flies ever attain to their full develop-

56 Baron Von HtlgeTs

ment; yet every one of these nineteen in every twenty
achieve, as far as they go, the type! They indicate, they
imply it. With mammals the waste is less, but still
very large if it is right to speak of "waste" where,
very possibly, life is, after all, the richer for even such
indications. When we come to man we still get some-
thing similar, the many mere beginnings of human
life children dead before birth, or before the age of
reason, idiots, the insane. Also the long centuries of
barbarism. All this, note, quite independent of any
personal fault, any sin, on the part of those inchoate
human beings. Well, here again we can say that so
far (that is, apart from sin) the world is, after all,
upon the whole richer were there no such indications
than if it were reduced to those individuals who attain
to the full human stature.

Now this great fact or law, this great difference
between type and individual, the realised ideal and the average
attainment, runs also clearly through the manifesta-
tions of God to man, and the apprehensions by man
of God and His condescensions. The Jewish religion
was not false for the thirteen centuries of the pro-
Christian operations; it was, for those times, God's
fullest self-revelation and man's deepest apprehension
of God; and this same Jewish religion can be, is, still
the fullest religious truth for numerous individuals
whom God leaves in their good faith; in their not
directly requiring the fuller, the fullest, light and aid
to Christianity. What is specially true of the Jewish
religion is, in a lesser but still a very real degree,
true of Mohammedanism, and even of Hinduism, of
Parseeism, etc. It is not true that all religions are
equally true, equally pure, equally fruitful the

Letters to a Niece 57

differences are, on the contrary, profound. And it
is our duty never to level down, never to deny or
ignore, God's upward-moving self-revelation, God's
/j^-religion. At the same time our ardour requires
harnessing to patience, to a meek encouragement to
all the smoking flax, all the broken reeds, of our
earthly time and comrades, for these are God's
individuals.

Now then, back to your precise question. The
ordinary Roman Catholic scholastic textbook teaches
that such good faith (not adequacy), such individual
sufficiency (not type-fullness), is more operative with
regard to ignorance, or even denial, of the Christian
Church, or even of Christ, than with regard to denial,
or even to ignorance of God. This because, after all,
Church and Christ are historical, contingent facts,
which require to be imparted to us, in a way, like
the existence of the Emperor Augustus and the reality
of the United States of America, thus at the beginning.
But, no doubt, the non-Christian religions all furnish
their followers with (imperfect) conceptions of God,
so also with (imperfect) conceptions of Christ (Moses,
Mohammed, Buddha, etc.) and imperfect conceptions
of the Church (temple, mosque, etc.). Whereas God
is the metaphysical absolute Reality, which is involved
in, which indicates itself in, our deepest needs, thoughts
and conscience. When I told you that story of Monsieur
Littre, I did so, amongst other reasons, in order to
indicate how careful, how non-judging, as to indivi-
duals, we should keep ourselves, even where such
individuals ignore or even deny God. Yet I do think
that the ordinary Roman Catholic teaching is after
a very real distinction, and also that present-day

5 8 Ear on Von

ordinary cheery dismissal of all thought of respon-
sibility, and even of guilt, in such denials, is but
part and parcel of the insufferable shallowness of
Naturalism.

Devoted old Uncle,

F. v. H.

GLONBOY, ENGLEFIELD GREEN, SURREY

i September, 1919.

I want this little scribble to reach you on your
starting your packing-fortnight, my very dear Niece.
I want to put very shortly, what has helped myself,
so greatly, for now a generation.

Well you are going to pack, pack and unpack,
unpack for a fortnight. What is it that I would have
you quietly set your mind and heart on, during that
in itself lonesome and dreary bit of your road, Child?
Why this, Dear! You see, all we do has a double-related-
ness. It is a link or links of a chain that stretches back
to our birth and on to our death. It is part of a long
train of cause and effect, of effect and cause, in your
own chain of life this chain variously intertwisted
with, variously affecting, and affected by, numerous
other chains and other lives. It is certainly your duty
to do quietly your best, that these links may help on
your own chain and those other chains, by packing
well, by being a skilful packer.

Yes, but there is also, all the time, another, a far
deeper, a most darling and inspiring relation. Here,
you have no slow succession, but you have each single
act, each single moment joined directly to GOD
Himself not a chain, but one Great Simultaneity.

Letters to a Niece 59

True, certain other acts, at other moments, will be
wanted, of a kind more intrinsically near to God
Prayer, Quiet, Holy Communion. Yet not even those
other acts could unite you as closely to God as can
do this packing, if and when the packing is the duty
of certain moments, and if, and as often as, the little
old daughter does this her packing with her heart and
intention turned to God her Home, if she offers her
packing as her service, that service which is perfect
liberty.

Not even a soul already in Heaven, not even an
angel or archangel, can take your place there; for
what GOD wants, what GOD will love to accept, in
those Herst rooms, in those packing days, and from
your packing hands, will be just this little packing
performed by the little niece in those little rooms.
Certainly it has been mainly through my realising this
doctrine a little, and through my poor little self-
exercising in it, that I have got on a bit, and
Gwen will get on faster than I have done with it.
You understand, Dear? At one moment packing; at
another, silent adoration in church; at another,
dreariness and unwilling drift; at another, the joys
of human affections given and received; at another,
keen, keen suffering of soul, of mind, in an apparent
utter loneliness; at another, external acts of religion;
at another, death itself. All these occupations, every one,
can, ought, and will be, each when and where, duty,
reason, conscience, necessity GOD calls for it it will
all become the means and instruments of loving, of
transfiguration, of growth for your soul, and of its
beatitude. But it is for GOD to choose these things,
their degrees, combinations, successions; and it is for

60 Baron Von Hugel's

Gwen, just simply, very humbly, very gently and
peacefully, to follow that leading.

Per Crucem ad Lucem.

Loving old Uncle,
H.

CLONBOY, ENGLEFIELD GREEN, SURREY

17 September, 1919.

Well, now, my darling Gwen, here is my letter for
your restarting in Salisbury. I will attempt to make
two, more or less new, points very important dis-
criminations very clear for you, after first getting
two immediate practical details out of the way.

I want you, then, carefully to study all the remaining
Latin (Roman) Christian books I have given or lent
you in the last packets. Tell me when you are getting
to the end of this study (the little Tertullian and the
Swete at least twice, please!), and I will get quite ready
for the first packet of Greek books classical (Pagan)
Greek books first on the same scale as that we did
the Latin books on.

And the second detail is your proposed visit to
Vicarage Gate excellent idea! Hillie and I get back
there on Monday next, 22 September. I have to
speak at a Birmingham little private meeting all
my hearers clerics on Monday, 27 October, and
I ought to keep at least ten days free before, for
preparation. Your Aunt Mary has a lady friend, who
has asked herself till about 2 October. As soon after
this 2 October that you can manage, say, three nights
with us, the better, as the weather will then be more

Letters to a Niece 61

likely to favour our getting our talks in Kensington
Gardens than later on. If you came by lunch-time,
and left by an afternoon train, that too would add
to our time in common. Let Aunt Mary or Hillie or
me know, some time pretty soon, Gwen!

Now for my points:

i. It is quite possible (it is certainly much the more
common state of soul) that your now deep and living
sense of religion is making non-religious subjects more
or less insipid to you that you are feeling it rather a
bore to concentrate upon Homer and Pindar, after
Tertullian and the Confessions. But if this is so, or if
it comes on later on, I want you, my Gwen, carefully
to ignore, and vigorously to react against, this mentality. If
there is one danger for religion if there is any one
plausible, all-but-irresistible trend which, throughout
its long rich history, has sapped its force, and prepared
the most destructive counter-excesses, it is just that
that allowing the fascinations of Grace to deaden or
to ignore the beauties and duties of Nature. What is
Nature? I mean all that, in its degree, is beautiful,
true, and good, in this many-levelled world of the one
stupendously rich God? Why, Nature (in this sense)
is the expression of the God of Nature; just as Grace
is the expression of the God of Grace. And not only
are both from God, and to be loved and honoured as
His: but they have been created, they are administered
and moved, by God, as closely inter-related parts of one
great whole of the full and vivid knowledge and
service of Him and happiness of ourselves. No Grace
without the substrata, the occasion, the material, of
Nature; and (in the individuals called to the realisa-
tion of the type) no Nature without Grace. Do you

62 Baron Von HiigeTs

fully grasp, my Gwen, what I am driving at? That
I want you, just because you long for religion, to
continue to cultivate, to cultivate more carefully and
lovingly, also the interests, the activities, that are
not directly religious. And this, not simply because,
"Why, of course, we must eat our dinner; of course,
we must have our little relaxations"; but, much more,
because, without these not directly religious interests
and activities, you however slowly and unperceivedly
lose the material for Grace to work in and on. When
we come to do the Church history of the Middle
Ages, and of the Renaissance, etc., I shall be able to
point out to you, on a huge scale, this great principle
either fructifying all or sterilising all. Meanwhile,
practise, practise it, Gwen; and keep it up, long after
I have gone! Hardly any woman works her religion thus',
but then, too, how thin and abstract, or how strained
and unattractive, the religion of most women becomes,
owing to this their elimination of religion's materials
and divinely intended tensions!

2. Hardly distinguishable in theory^ yet rather
different in practice, is the other point I want you
carefully to watch. I have so much insisted upon
the Church in my recommendations that it may look
inconsistent if I warn you against Church societies,
Church newspapers the little Churchinesses which,
I should think, must be fairly frequent in your cathedral
town yet, my Gwen! just this, the equivalent of just
this, has been perhaps my longest, subtlest difficulty
and temptation, ever since, through God's mercy,
the Church took me, and I gave myself to the Church.
It was only when I was forty that this trouble and
uncertainty ceased again owing to light from and

Letters to a Niece 63

through a saintly leader. I never have gained the
bigger lights on myself, except that way. To love Holy
Communion, yet tactfully, unironically, to escape from
all Eucharistic Guilds, etc.; to care for God's work
in the world especially in and through Christianity,
and yet (again quite silently, with full contrary
encouragement to others who are helped by such
literature) never opening a Church paper or maga-
zine; and so on, and so on: what a pushing forward
and a sudden inhibiting back all this seems to be!

Yet, if you are made at all like myself what safety,
what expansion, will be yours! This, though, only if
you have your life full of good, wholesome not tech-
nically religious interests; and if these non-religious
interests are more and more penetrated, warmed,
widened, sweetened by the purest, humblest, most
self-oblivious, homely heroism of super-nature of
Grace in the full sense of the word. Such a life will
also greatly help you in keeping free from what
might make you an unnecessary stumbling-block to
other not yet religiously awake souls; and this with-
out the least indifference or sorry "naturalising" on
your part. At forty I learnt this; at forty or so, my
Gwen, learn you this also.

I need not say that neither i nor 2 are of any
obligation for you. They are only suggestions for you
to watch and to see whether, and how, they fit you.
If you cannot get forward in this fashion, by all means
get on in the other way. I only want to clear away
every possible half-notion that to love God, Christ,
Church dearly, it is necessary for everyone (hence also
for you) to be churchy. But again, Gwen, humility, con-
sideration, patience: encouraging of others to become

64 Baron Von Huge/'s

quite different from ourselves; all this can alone
render the kind of independence I mean, safe, because
creaturely, and the isolation not fundamental or ulti-
mate, but only one concerned with middle things, with
means and afflictions.

Am now weary. God bless you, Child. Be faithful,
and He will sweeten to you, in the long run, all things,
even bitter death itself.

Loving old,

Uncle.

VICARAGE GATE

My darling Gwen, 23 September, 1919. I

Your interesting letter, awaiting my return here
yesterday, raises important points which I will con-
sider with you in a letter a little later on (and when
you turn up here for one night), on 8 October. Better
that than nothing!

But I must at once make the following suggestions
to you as to the five books I send you to-day. Your
first Greek packet. They are all your property except
one volume Bury's History of Greece. You can, if you
like, begin at once on Homer. But I think it will be
better to take the three histories first, and only then
the Homer and the Hesiod. But in any case you should
read the histories in the order: (i) Bury, (2) Gilbert
Murray, (3) Groiset; and the texts in the order: (i) Iliad,
(2) Odyssey, (3) Hesiod.

Now as to these six volumes singly:

(i) Bury. I wish I could have found another one
volume, as recent and (for surface matters) as compe-
tent a history of Greece, by some other more believing

Letters to a Niece 65

and spiritual writer. For Bury is a clever, smart,
shallow thing is growing it more and more, and
aggressively irreligious as well. But this book is very
much up-to-date as to excavations the maps and
illustrations are excellent and in it he is not so
rampantly doctrinaire as he has since become. Per-
haps one careful reading with notes taken from it
will be enough keeping the book by you for further
occasional use.

(2) Murray. Hardly, even he, a very deep, rich soul;
but distinctly better than Bury and has a wonderful
penetration in the literature as such I would certainly
read him, most carefully, at least twice.

(3) Croiset. You will feel the charm of these French-
men; read it twice. Have got their larger five-volume
History ; and could at any time lend you this or that
or all the volumes.

(4) Iliad. I think this translation is the best for under-
standing Homer. Pray read and re-read it all, and
compare the parts in the ^Eneid with the corresponding
parts here a very educative study.

(5) Odyssey. I send the translation of that cranky
genius S. Butler because it so wonderfully hits off
the homey tone of the original and the maps, pictures,
notes, are all most suggestive. But, of course, his
contention that the author was a woman is sheer
moonshine not very unlike Harnack's contention
that Priscilla (with Aquila's collaboration) wrote the
Epistle to the Hebrews. But re-read the Odyssey and
compare carefully corresponding parts (very numerous
and lengthy) in the ./Eneid.

(6) Hesiod. Introduction and Works and Days at least
H

66 Baron Von HugePs

twice remainder once compare Works and Days
carefully with Virgil's Georgics.

Devoted old Uncle,

F. v. H.

13 VICARAGE GATE, W.8

My darling Gwen, 6 October, 1919.

I write to-day, hoping that this (now the strike is
over) may reach you to-morrow on the first anniver-
sary of your dear father's death. I often and often
think of him; indeed he, just as you yourself, child,
are in my poor prayers thrice every day. And I love
to think that, if he, in that great life beyond, is allowed
to know what happens here below to his youngest, he
is glad and grateful for your deep growth during this
year thus just gone by. This growth has assuredly
preserved, and only still further deepened, the noble
good all the touching purity and generosity he
taught you and he exemplified to you, indeed which,
in a true sense, he gave you with his blood.

I want to write now, also, because, since you cannot
come just now (very naturally, though I am truly
sorry), I should like to make some remarks upon quite
a number of practical points or of questions raised by
you since last I wrote.

i. As to the practical points:

(i.) Much frequentation of the cathedral. You know
well, how greatly I love this for you. Yet there is one
warning I would give you, and would beg you to
bear in mind. Do not overdo it: I mean, do not take
your utter fill, while the attraction is thus strong.

Letters to a Niece 67

If we want our fervour to last, we must practise
moderation even in our prayer, even in our Quiet.
And certainly it is perseverance in the spiritual life,
on and on, across the years and the changes of our
moods and trials, health and environment: it is this
that supremely matters. And you will, Gwen, add
greatly to the probabilities of such perseverance, if
you will get into the way (after having settled upon
the amount of time that will be wise for you to give
to the cathedral, or your Prayer of Quiet in general)
of keeping a little even beyond this time, when you
are dry; and a little short of this time when you are
in consolation. You see why, don't you? Already
the Stoics had the grand double rule: abstine et sustine,
"abstain and sustain," i.e. moderate thyself in things
attractive and consoling, persevere, hold out, in things
repulsive and desolating. There is nothing God loves
better, or rewards more richly, than such double
self-conquest as this! Whereas, all those who heed-
lessly take their glut of pleasant things, however sacred
these things may be, are in grave danger of soon out-
living their fervour, even if they do not become
permanently disgusted.

(ii.) As to Churchy people, I did not, of course, mean
devotedly Christian people, lovers of the Church, who
work these loves into a large thoughtfulness. . . .

(iii.) As to Bury's History : please, Dear, write your
name in it, and keep it as a further gift from me: it
will be very useful for frequent reference in most of
your further readings of Greek things. And, Child,
try, by very frequent looking at the coin illustrations,
to connect the chief Greek cities with their coins. It

68 Baron Von Hugel's

is in that way that the geography of ancient Greece
sticks in my head. And dull as geography, and still
more chronology, are, when taken simply by them-
selves yet without them without a clear framework
of time and space in which to place and to remember
the facts, external or interior, of the history, you will
never remember the facts, and hence you will never
be able yourself to reason upon, to apply the history.
Let the coins help you very largely!

2. As to questions:

(i.) Shakespeare's Macbeth. I think you are right,
and that there there is a truly Christian penetration and
estimate. To-day week I will send you, on long loan,
a glorious book: Bradley's Shakesperean Tragedy : Hamlet,
Macbeth, Othello, Lear. You will love it, I am sure.
It is a book really worthy of its subject.

(ii.) Shorthouse's John Inglesant. I must say I feel
that book to have but one (a truly great) greatness, as
against three very bad faults faults which, I must
confess, continue to spoil the pleasure I might other-
wise find in it. The book, then, I think, has one per-
ception, or, rather, an instinct stronger than the
author is himself aware of I mean an all-penetrating
sense of the massiveness, the awful reality, of the
spiritual life within the Roman Catholic Church. This
that he thus sees, is assuredly a fact, and a huge fact;
but it is a fact unknown, or turned away from, or
minimised by the large majority even of religious
Englishmen. And I really believe that the undoubtedly
great fascination of this book for so many serious souls,
is just this its all-pervading sense of that very certain
but very largely unknown fact. But then I feel that

Letters to a Niece 69

to one who, like myself, has lived within, has lived
and been redeemed and been formed by that great
life in that great Church, that discovery of Short-
house is no discovery: if anything, such an one is
somewhat irritated that something to him so massively
plain, should the discovery of it stamp a book as
quite sui generis. And then, against that strength of
the book stand, I think, three great even if smaller,
weaknesses, (i) The book, the man's style, indeed mind,
are precious surely as much so as is Pater's Marius.
All that is turned and re-turned, is cooked to my
taste to weariness. (2) The central figure and fate in
the book Molinos and his end are far from certainly
what they are painted here. Possible it is that Molinos
was innocent; I have studied the case very carefully,
and have said so in print. But there is no certainty;
and much too much mysticism and moral depravity
have certainly gone together in not a few other cases.
(3) The underlying doctrine of the book is very lop-
sided, indeed it is false. All through a Quaker indiffer-
ence to the visible, to Forms, to History to the Body
in Time and Space is actively at work. Yet nothing
is being more clearly re-proved, quite independently
of the old institutions, by modern psychology, than
that that independence is only possible in a world
saturated with the results of dependence. Mysticism,
in all religions, always comes long after those religions
have won and trained the soul by their historic
happenednesses, by then- close contact with time and
space. We shall find this, my Gwen, later on, with the
Ancient Greek, the Indian, the Jewish, the Moham-
medan, the Christian religions. And to think like
Shorthouse is historic ingratitude of a high degree.

70 Baron Von Hugel's

I find that, throughout his book, those that insist
strongly on institutions and that fear or oppose more
or less pure Mysticism, are all, in so far, worldings,
power-lovers, Pharisees, etc.! Stuff" and nonsense:
I know that this is a clumsy, false analysis; although,
of course, there are worldlings amongst the strong
institutionalists, as there are fanatics or moral deca-
dents amongst the "exquisite" mystics.

3. Dean Colet. Yes, he is a very attractive per-
sonality, and Seebohm's book is a good book. But
I have changed I have had to change much as to
those Renaissance Catholic reformers these last ten
years. My ideal used to be Sir Thomas More. I still,
of course, admit their greatness; and I hold still, with
all my heart, that that Reform would have been far
better than the Protestant violences which supplanted
it. But I now have found in detail how profoundly
ignorant, how bigoted, were all these men, as to the
Middle Ages they lumped these latter indiscrimi-
nately together, as just one long six or seven centuries
or more of utter barbarism and contemptible
puerilities. Dante and Aquinas, Anselm, Bernard,
the Poverello: barbarians! What a notion! The fact
is, certainly we are all coming to know it well now
that these men came at the fag-end of some five
generations of Iron Middle Ages, of their dissolution;
and they were too disgusted, too impatient, too much
blinded by the new light and lights, to pierce through
those 150 years, back to the Golden Middle Ages.
The Golden Middle Age is the culmination, so far,
of the Christian spirit as a world force and a world
outlook; and compared with its greatest figures just
named, even More and Colet, Fisher and Erasmus,

Letters to a Niece 7 i

are thin and literary indeed. This too. Sweet, you
will be shown in detail later on.

Now I will have to be pretty silent till October is
at an end; have to incubate my address at Birmingham
on 27 October. Grand if you could come here soon
after.

Loving old Uncle,
H.

13 VICARAGE GATE, KENSINGTON

From Letter of All Saints' Eve, 1919.

My darling Niece-Child,

Here, at last, I come to speak to you again on
paper the work, the getting to, and the resting
from, Birmingham have, till now, prevented me. But
I was very glad to get that sweet little letter of yours,
before starting off from this huge Babylon for that
also very big place. I myself felt, once off, that I was
attempting a great deal. Yet it all went off, I think,
quite well. My two forenoons there I spent in the
really beautiful Art Galleries I enclose photo post
card of one of the pictures for my darling Gwen. But
how much of the art of not thirty years ago, or a
little beyond Leighton, Burne-jones especially
has already died without repair, and why? Because
it was precious, unmoral, at bottom un-, even anti-
Christian (in the widest sense of the word) . One feels
it affiliated to moral unwholesomeness. . . .

Strange it is, but a fact, that human studies should
more incline men to religion than natural studies;
strange because the difficulties against religion are
almost confined to precisely the human range. The

72 Baron Von Hugel's

fact is, doubtless, that religion thrives, not by the
absence of difficulties, but by the presence, by its
offer and proof of powers not procurable otherwise;
and that the need for these powers, and the evidence
for the operation of their forces, only arises clearly
at the human level.

Gwen, look up, look up with me, to-morrow! Oh,
what a glorious, touching company! It is the feast
of every heroic soul, every heroic act inspired by
God since man began on earth. Sweet, how our little
earthly years are fleeing by. Pindar called our life
" the dream of a shadow." Yet in it, and through it,
if we but watch and pray, and work and suffer, and
rest in God our Home, we can find Eternity; that
will never pass away. Pray for your loving old,

Uncle-Father.

13 VICARAGE GATE, KENSINGTON, W.8

My Gwen-Child, 3 December, 1919.

Here, then, is Eternal Life. I would advise your first
reading up to the end of page 120, twice. Then,
pages 303 to end, twice. And only then the far more
difficult pages 121-302, also twice. Unless I greatly
err, you will learn a considerable amount, provided
you understand the technicalities as they occur. I did
not choose the title, or even my subject; but you will
find friends, already known, in these pages St. Augus-
tine, Huvelin, etc., not to speak of the Psalms and
the New Testament I wrote the thing praying; read
it as written, Child!

Letters to a Niece 73

I am sorry you are finding the Groiset so dry. I see
why my fault. Those two brothers wrote a delightful,
not dry, History of Greek Literature in the five volumes
have got it. But I stupidly forgot how all abridgments
are, almost always, dry as sawdust! So do not, Sweet,
force yourself to read it through.

Your new packet is getting ready nicely. But the
Herodotus is reprinting just now; and I have not yet
spotted the Bury on the Greek historians. But I have
a good little book on Pindar ready; Pindar translated
by Ernest Myers, and a fine selection of translations
from the Greek Anthology if you don't love the latter
well, you will show a patch of insensibility on your
brain.

I well understand how delightful your father's Eton
diaries must be; they will form an important part of
the Life, no doubt. I love to note, Dear, that the same
kind of spontaneous intelligence for, and thirst after
music, and the same assumption that such intelligence
and thirst are, must be, universal, are with you, his
daughter, in reference to religion. Thekla has been
telling me how marked she found a trait of genuine
contemplation in you, Sweet. Well, it is all God's work;
we will think of Him and love Him ever more and
more; and we will bear as patiently as ever we can
our loneliness in these respects. We will never feel
badly lonely, if we keep expanding our direct knowledge
of living lovers of God by a vivid realisation of the love
of him borne in the hearts of souls now in the beyond.

I am so glad you loved the Huvelin: you will have
noticed everywhere in him that tenderness in austerity,
and that austerity in tenderness, which is the very
genius of Christianity.

74 Baron Von

Must not scribble on to-day. Have started studying
for my book, and I require oceans of rest in between.

Loving old Uncle-Father,

H.

13 VICARAGE GATE, KENSINGTON, W.8

My darling Gwen-Child, 2 January, 1920.

I had counted upon writing my first 1920 letter to
you; but, alas, strict duty intervened, and forced me
to write to other three people instead. But I want you
to look upon this scribble as though written on New
Year's Day itself.

I want, then, to wish you a very rich, deep, true,
straight and simple growth in the love of God, accepted
and willed gently but greatly, at the daily, hourly, cost
of self . I have to try my little old best more than ever
at this, now; for I find that any and all brooding or
sulking or useless self-occupation any pride or vanity
at once disturbs or dries up my incubation-work.
Professor James Ward and I agreed, one day, that
nothing in philosophy, still more in religion, should
ever be attempted in and with the first clearness
(what, e.g., journalists are content with, and have to
be content with), but in and with the second clearness,
which only comes after that first cheery clarity has
gone, and has been succeeded by a dreary confusion
and obtuseness of mind. Only this second clearness,
rising up, like something in no wise one's own, from
the depths of one's subconsciousness only this is any
good in such great matters. And this process is costly,
humiliating, and very easily disturbed by rubbishy
self-occupations.

Letters to a Niece 7 5

I am so glad you are trying to work the Imitation
into your life: it is the only way to read it which is
really worthy of what itself is so intensely alive. Now
there is a book written as should be all religious books;
they should be the quintessence of a long experience
and fight in suffering and self-transformation. Also
the twenty Huvelin sayings they sprang straight from
a life penetrated by God and the deepest love of Him.
I will, a little later on, copy out for you another
twenty sayings they are all, please God, at work
within me; and how happy, if they can get to work
in the Niece-child also!

As to my Apocalyptic Element, keep it as long as you
feel re-reading it can help you. I have two or three
other papers which may also be of use to you. But,
you see, with religious reading I always feel the
situation is different from more ordinary reading.
I mean that religious reading should always be select,
slow, ruminating, and given to comparatively few
books or papers. So we will, when you are again
ready, get on with our Greek things plenty of them
and, alongside, and behind them all, will be our
few deepest readings, full of prayer, full of self-humilia-
tion, full of gentle attempts gently to will whatever
suffering God may kindly send us. A Jesuit novice
once told me, with kindling countenance, how grand
he had found the practice of at once meeting suffering
with joy. God alone can help us succeed in this; but
what. Child, is Christianity, if it be not something
like that?

Loving old,

Uncle-Father.

76 Baron Von Hugel's

FROM LETTER OF 17 FEBRUARY, IQ2O

My darling Child, Shrove Tuesday.

I want this letter to reach you on Ash Wednesday>
when we all start Lent, because there is one little
practice I should like to dwell upon for a minute, in
case you have not yet waked up to it, or that you
require, perhaps, a little encouragement in it. I mean
the practice of some little voluntary renunciation.
I know well, of course, my Gwen, how much vague
and airy wisdom oozes out of the comfortable and
shallow modern mind about this. But then you see,
we have the little (!) examples of the Baptist in the
wilderness, with his wild honey and locusts meal;
Our Lord's Fast of forty days; St. Paul's mastery of
his body; and really, without a break, the asceticism
of all the great saints. I say this not to suggest anything
special in your food, sleep or dress; and as to the
amount of church, half an hour a day will be enough,
and it would be unwise to add to it, even in Lent.
But I am thinking of something without thinking
what that would correspond, say, to my not buying
any books for myself during Lent. Depend upon it,
such little self-checks checks on good propensions,
and checks self-imposed where they spring from
love, really feed love. They are good things and still
useful to your spiritual growth.

Loving old,

Father-Uncle.

13 VICARAGE GATE

My darling Child, 20 February, 1920.

You will by now have already got those two big

Letters to a Niece 77

tomes of mine. 1 May you find sufficient that you
really understand, or can get to understand, to make
your study of them spiritually fruitful. The book has
been out of print some four years now; but this copy
is really (barring the wrappers) still quite fresh; it
was quite uncut-open yesterday; it is I who cut it
open for you, Sweet! Bishop Gore, who has been very
kind about the book, pointed out several grave defects
in it. That the style is often heavy, sometimes slipshod;
that there is too much of quotation, or semi-quotation
in it; and that the narration portion is without any
narrative charm. I am sure he is right about all three
points. But I feel him wrong about a fourth objection
of his: that I ought to have taken a fully normal saint,
like St. Teresa, and not a person so difficult to know,
so unusual, and more or less out of the way even in
her natural character, as is this Fiesca. He is wrong,
because I wanted precisely such a figure for my
special purposes. I wanted a heroic Christian who
was almost a Neo-Platonist, an Institutional who, in
some ways, hung loosely on institutions; a deep thinker
beset with much psycho-physical disturbance, etc.
Similarly Professor Boyce-Gibson was, I feel, mistaken,
when he wanted the book to have finished the first
volume with the death of Ettore Vernazza. He did
not see that I was well aware of the inferiority, at
least in charm, of Battista to Catherine, to Ettore.
What then? I was not aiming at a work of art, but
at taking in as much as possible of real life to show
very original and exquisite spirituality having to live
on largely in this rough world, to get somewhat con-
ventionalified to suit the array of even very good

1 The Mystical Element in Religion,

Baron Von Hugel's

people. Of course, that Bishop Gore and Professor '
Boyce-Gibson did not see these two motives of mine
in the book itself, proves how little an artist in words
the old Uncle is!

I think you would find the Appendix at end of
Volume I. too dry and hard for you. But I hope that
you will really care for, and learn from, the Introduc-
tion and the whole of Volume II. It is chapter ii.
(in the Introduction) that has had much the most of
the appreciation accorded to the book; but, for myself,
I feel as though Volume II. was the best of the whole.

My Sweet, you were thoroughly right about Richard
his unripeness for Tiele I am sure I often make
that sort of mistake for the young.

Your simile, your example of the two clearances in
musical execution is capital. So glad of it, too, because
it shows you are getting well into your violining again.
Am surrounded by the middle state the obscurity
and muddle as regards my book. One must just
work on and hope and pray. The God of light will
help us.

H.

13 VICARAGE GATE, W.8

From Letter of 5 March, 1920.

My darling Gwen-Child,

I was so sorry that you had a headache when you
wrote me that last note. Mind you do not use your
head on any concentrated work when you are like
that. . . .

But I was very pleased that somehow you are able
to resume the systematic non-religious reading. I was

Letters to a Niece 79

a little astonished at this, having thought, regretfully,
that your life had really become too full for such
reading. This notion of mine explains that I was not,
on the receipt of your note, ready with further Greek
books for just this stage of your reading.

I wondered too, for a moment, whether you had
not possibly forgotten, or had not yet explored, the
other Pindar book I sent you. I got you this later
booklet, just because I knew well how much the
reading of Pindar becomes really enjoyable, the back-
ground of which you speak. I thought this booklet
would supply this environment; anyhow I at once
ordered for you an excellent book, The Athletic Festivals
of Ancient Greece. But I learn it is out of print. I have
now, however, gone one better and ordered you
Whitley's Companion to Greek Studies, which will not
only illustrate Pindar for you, but also the Historians,
and the Dramatists, indeed the Philosophers also,
I hope. I think I can count on having this fine book
on Monday. . . .

The packet will contain three further books:

2. The Extant Odes of Pindar, translated by Ernest
Myers; a scholarly piece of work which I should like
you to read, ode for ode, each after the translation
of Sandys.

3. ... a. Guide to British Museum Greek and Roman Life.

4. ... a Guide to the Principal Gold and Silver Coins
of the Ancients, 700 B.C. to A.D. /.

When we have fully and repeatedly assimilated
Pindar (mind you also read Andre Bremond's article
on him) we will move on to the Greek Historians.
I shall want you to get to first love Herodotus. We

8o Baron Von HugeTs

will do him in a leisurely, sun-basking way which
alone befits this leisurely genial soul.

I am sure that when, say twenty years hence, you
look back upon your life, you will specially thank
God for this double current I have tried to establish
in your mind and soul. The current directly religious
this very pure in quality and genially costly; the
current not directly religious, this also very large and
deep a great bucket of pure water into which to
drop drops of the purest religious wine. This greatly
helps us to escape all reactions.

Loving old Uncle,
H.

13 VICARAGE GATE, KENSINGTON, W.

My darling Child, 17 March, 1920.

I do not at all like these bad headaches of yours,
and the suspicion that perhaps it is the fiddling that
causes them. I should indeed grieve if you had to give
up what so uniquely expresses your true self. I am
comforting myself by hoping that, even if it really is
the violining, it is that only in the sense that you are
paying for the acclimatising of your nerves, etc., to
this large, now new, life; and that, by dodging the
headaches and wisely persevering in between them,
you may be able to end by adapting your physical
conditions to it or again you might have to reduce
the playing for a while, say, to two hours a day, instead
of four hours. I hope that, in any case, my little old
Gwen daughter will strive elastically to manage the
fiddling after all. There is certainly a great art in
managing one's nervous energy. I have myself, all

Letters to a Niece 8 1

my life, had to coax, and by various circumvendifuges,
get my work out of my restive kittle-cattle machinery.
Glad Olivia does the types of Greek coins with
you I have no ambition for you to take up numis-
matics generally whole tracts of that country seem
to me hardly more soul-feeding than postage stamps.
It is the Greek coins that really are educative not
as coins but Greek, as part of that marvellous people's
artistic creations. Had Richard here on Monday
looking forward to having him for a night soon. I feel
you treat that very promising lad exactly rightly.

Your loving old,

Father.

13 VICARAGE GATE, W.8

My darling Gwen-Child, 26 March, 1920.

A hundred, a thousand welcomes, of nature and of
grace, of the sweet spring country, of the future
delightful garden, of the spacious, almost empty,
bedroom full, full, Gwen, of the thought, the pre-
sence, the real presence of the living God, and of the
little old church so nearby, which will always welcome
you to its sacred coolness and dimness, and remind
you of God's condescensions in the Incarnation and
Holy Eucharist! Welcome, too, from those nice, ten
workmen such an excellent experience for those three!
Welcome, too, from those said three how soon all
three will be there, and how soon after they will have
come really to feel this home at last, all the more so
since they will themselves help to make it all really
homey! Welcome, too, from Edward Talbot, the cleric

82 Baron Von HugePs

who has helped you so much and also will so much
care to see your settlement.

I am so pleased, too, that you have evidently got
fully bitten by Pindar, that that grandly clean and
religious mind is colouring your own. Bravo!

I received back from you, all right, the Gardner
Types of Greek Coins the Butcher, the catalogue of
Greek gems (glad you admired that wonderful Augustus
cameo!), and Andre Bremond's raper on Pindar, and
my two articles on Troeltsch (I expect the poor little
Gwen found these really too hard to read). By all
means keep those other four papers of mine yet awhile.

I spoke on Tuesday evening last (23rd) to some
sixty students from all the English, Scotch, Welsh
and Irish universities and chief colleges. The Execu-
tive Council of the Christian Student Movement
very eager, cultivated, religious young people. I spoke
for forty-five minutes on "Responsibility and Religious
Belief." Now I am busy writing out suggestions and
criticisms for a new sketch of that striking Sikh convert
to Christianity, Sadhu-Sundar-Singh. My chief desi-
deratum here is that he should come to realise not
only the utility, but the strict necessity, of definite
Church appurtenance and ecclesiastical subordination.
You see, a month after his conversion at sixteen, he
felt called to, and took, the vow of the Sadhu life
the Indian ascetical, celibate, poor, wandering life
which he now took as that of a Christian preaching
friar. He has faithfully practised this to now (twenty-
nine). But even the slight Church appurtenance which
sprang from his baptism by the Anglican Metropolitan
of India, and his six months' study in an Anglican
theological college, with a preaching licence granted

Letters to a Niece 83

him at the end even that he soon repudiated to the
great joy of the Nonconformist individualist mis-
sionaries of India. I am trying to show how crude,
how without solid Christian precedents is such a
monasticism, with such a sheer aloofness from every
Church organisation. I am trying to drive home
St. Teresa's magnificent rule for all her own life and
for that of her nuns to this day that she believed
herself to have received very real direct revelations,
and that she hoped her nuns might receive the same.
But that never had she allowed herself, or were they to
allow themselves, under the apparent suggestion of
any revelation, to decide anything concerning their
duties, work, appurtenances, dependants. On the
contrary, the genuineness of the revelations, or at
least the right use made of them, would always have
to be measured by the increased obedience, self-oblivion,
love of enemies, suffering death, of the recipient of
such favours.

God bless you, child.

H.

FROM EASTER MONDAY LETTER

My darling Gwen, 5 April, 1920.

I was so glad to get your first Old Rectory letter of
30 March. But first let me say that I have purposely
waited till we should have got through these every
year newly wonderful Church days so as to be able
to refer to the entire prism of many-coloured fact and
emotion which only thus together give us the true
Christian reality and life. The great fact, and even

84 Baron Von HfigePs

the commemoration of, Good Friday, would, alone,
be too austere, too heartbreaking; the great fact, and
even just the feast of Easter, if alone even if they had
followed upon Our Lord's Hidden Life, or even His
Preaching, but without the Passion and its commemora-
tion, would not have drained the Cup the bitter
Cup of the possibilities of earthly human life and
earthly human interconnection to the dregs. Good
Friday and Easter Sunday, the two together, each
requiring the other, and we all requiring both only
this twin fact gives us Christianity, where suffering
holds a necessary place, but never the place of the
end, always only of the means. My great Troeltsch
always marvels anew at that unique combination
effected by Christianity so earnest and so wwrigoristic
so expansive and so full of suffering without morbid-
ness, and of joy without sentimentality. We will all,
please God, see this more and more every year, that
these bitter-sweet, contraction - expansion, sacrifice
serenity, great days come round.

Oh, how, next to one's prayers and the practice
of the Presence of God, one's work, my absorption in
the mornings in my book its immediate preparation
and composition, helps one to limit, to ignore and
bear one's load.

I am now deep in section i of the body of the book,
but dare not yet write any of this till I see more
clearly, more vividly, the main points and lines of
my position. It is Kant especially I have to master, as
to contend with the section on him in Eternal Life
may have given you some fair notion of him.

Letters to a Niece 85

13 VICARAGE GATE, KENSINGTON, W.8

21 April, 1920.

Here at last, my Gwen-child, I come to my scribbling
to you! I have four letters of yours three of them long.
But I think they give me chiefly one big subject-matter
for consideration the stress of dryness and darkness,
and what to do then. I know oh, well, well what
that means. And I do not doubt that with your special
temperament, such times must be peculiarly trying.
But mark this well. Child irreplaceably profitable. If
you but gently persevere through them, you will
come out at the other end of the gloom, sooner or
later, into ever deeper, tenderer day.

Let me give you three images, all of which have
helped me on along "many a flinty furlong." At
eighteen I learnt from Father Raymond Kecking,
that grandly interior-minded Dominican, that I cer-
tainly could, with God's grace, give myself to Him,
and strive to live my life long with Him and for Him.
But that this would mean winning and practising much
desolation that I would be climbing a mountain
where, off and on, I might be enveloped in mist for
days on end, unable to see a foot before me. Had
I noticed how mountaineers climb mountains? how
they have a quiet, regular, short step on the level it
looks petty; but then this step they keep up, on and
on, as they ascend, whilst the inexperienced townsman
hurries along, and soon has to stop, dead beat with
the climb. That such an expert mountaineer, when
the thick mists come, halts and camps out under some
slight cover brought with him, quietly smoking his

86 Baron Von

pipe, and moving on only when the mist has cleared
away.

Then in my thirties I utilised another image, learnt
in my Jesuit Retreats. How I was taking a long journey
on board ship, with great storms pretty sure ahead of
me; and how I must now select, and fix in my little
cabin, some few but entirely appropriate things a
small trunk fixed up at one end, a chair that would
keep its position, tumbler and glass that would do
ditto: all this, simple, strong, and selected throughout
in view of stormy weather. So would my spirituality
have to be chosen and cultivated especially in view
of "dirty" weather.

And lastly, in my forties another image helped me
they all three are in pretty frequent use still! I am
travelling on a camel across a huge desert. Windless
days occur, and then all is well. But hurricanes of
wind will come, unforeseen, tremendous. What to do
then? It is very simple, but it takes much practice to
do well at all. Dismount from the camel, fall prostrate
face downwards on the sand, covering your head with
your cloak. And lie thus, an hour, three hours, half
a day: the sandstorm will go, and you will arise, and
continue your journey as if nothing had happened. The
old Uncle has had many, many such sandstorms. How
immensely useful they are!

You see, whether it be great cloud-mists on the
mountain-side, or huge, mountain-high waves on the
ocean, or blinding sandstorms in the desert: there is
each time one crucial point to form no conclusions,
to take no decisions, to change nothing during such
crises, and especially at such times, not to force any
particularly religious mood or idea in oneself. To turn

Letters to a Niece 87

gently to other things, to maintain a vague, general
attitude of resignation to be very meek, with oneself
and with others: the crisis goes by, thus, with great
fruit. What is a religion worth which costs you nothing?
What is a sense of God worth which would be at
your disposal, capable of being comfortably elicited
when and where you please? It is far, far more God
who must hold us, than we who must hold Him. And
we get trained in these darknesses into that sense of
our impotence without which the very presence of
God becomes a snare.

As to your feeling the facts of life and of religion
complicated that would be, I expect, in any oppressive
way, only during such desolations. Yet I want to note
this point for you viz. that though I believe your
Confessions and Imitation (with Psalms and New
Testament), and the Church Service, do not strain
you, nor, I think, my letters written specially for
yourself, I am not at all sure of my writings in this
respect. I mean that they are the writings of, I believe,
a masculine mind that they contain far more sheer
thinking than is suited to a woman even a woman
with as rarely much intellect as yourself, Child. This
is why I was slow to give or to lend you my writings.
Yet I did so, because I want you to feel that there is
also much hard thinking, much unpettifying of the
great lesson which God's world and work convey if
we can and do front them fairly. I wanted you, even
in times of temptation, to feel the realities you were
called to, perhaps straining at times even apparently
mere illusions but not cramping, not petty. You can
thus settle quietly into your little cabin with the huge
billows buffeting you, the ship: their size has not

88 Baron F^on HugePs

been minimised: they are huge: well, God is in the
storm as in the calm! But, of course, I am deeply glad
the sunshine and calm are back again. And certainly
these, and these at their utmost, are intended for our
eventual life!

Par passage penible

Passons a port plaisant,

carved a prisoner on to the wall of his cell, during his
long imprisonment in the White Tower of the Tower
of London. That is just it; both are true, both are facts:
the penible of the passage, and the plaisant oh, its
grand expanse of the port.

As to Olivia's English literature I enclose the list
of Selections I was thinking of from the 1913 catalogue
of the Clarendon Press; they will be costing now,
not fourpence but sixpence, I expect. Am so glad
I was made to learn a lot by heart as a boy; Olivia
might do the same from out of these excellent
Selections.

Mr. Clement Webb is to preside at my address at
Oxford on 1 6 May: so that I shall be sitting under an
old and very tactful friend. My book preparations
are getting on, and help me to forget the financial
trials.

13 VICARAGE GATE, KENSINGTON

i May, 1920.

Here I come at last, darling Child mine, with one
of my longer scribbles!

First, as to the books sent this morning four all
gifts.

(i) Herodotus two volumes. The translation is

Letters to a Niece 89

excellent, and the notes very good. You must get to
love, love that genial creature a sort of prose Greek
Chaucer, a man with a genius for telling a story, and
with a deep sense of religion too. You will find Book II.
(Egypt) quite delightful, most interesting. Why not
do that most thoroughly, with Olivia? hitching it on
to the Egyptian history learnt at school?

It is, however, a grave error to treat Herodotus as
a genial old crony where he describes countries and
customs seen by himself, and events lived through by
himself, he is most accurate, most reliable e.g. Egypt
and the Graeco-Persian War.

(2) British Museum Guide to the Egyptian Collection.
One of Dr. Wallis Budge's admirable books. Every
word is worth considering, with the pictures as
companion to Herodotus, Book II.

- (3) Thucydides (mind thatjy, please!), The Sicilian
Expedition. This is perhaps the finest, certainly the
most rounded-ofF thing of Thucydides. Mind you
study it most carefully twice every word at least!
The maps at the end, your occasional atlas, the Little
Classical Antiquities the coin book. All would help to
make it all live and real the only way to study
histories.

(4) Thucydides the Speeches in Jowett's translation.
I should have liked to give you a complete translation.
But the complete Jowett costs too much for just now.
Besides it will be better if you first master the Sicilian
Expedition part and these glorious speeches. Later on
we can tackle the whole from cover to cover.

Of course, in the Thucydides Speeches you will look
out technical terms in your Antiquities, and before

90 Baron Von HUgel's

tackling either Herodotus or Thucydides you will
read up carefully what Gilbert Murray says about
them in his Greek Literature.

Next as to Oxford. I was there three days. I had
much the biggest audience I have ever had till this
I had 250 at most, this must have been some eight or
nine hundred. They were very attentive. I suppose
four-fifths undergraduates. Richard only three benches
off, smiling and most keen all the time; I felt it was
a great support to see a good many senior faces there
which I knew well. But, besides, I always remember,
on such occasions, what Socrates said so sensibly to
his disciples preparing for public speaking, that even
the biggest audience is, after all, only composed of
individuals and of small groups, whom they would
have no fear at all to address. Also I find it important
never to read, always to speak my things, to take care
to have humorous stories and not too great intervals;
and to manage little pauses, starting afresh in a different
voice. After the fifty-five-minutes-long address was
over, some two hundred and fifty people, almost all
undergraduates, came across to Queen's College
Common Room, and I had there, for an hour, to
answer some ten questions written down for me, from
the spoken queries. Only two or three were at all
good, I thought; but still such answerings do help to
drive points into people's heads. I felt it profoundly
un-Protestant, but was pleased to feel that its central
point no thoughtful High Church Anglican would
deny. It had an edge, but not against Anglicanism
against Lutheranism; and yet I knew that at least
one keen Lutheran was listening, hoping, I am sure,
that I would turn out too superfine for the kind of

Letters to a Niece 91

stuff, my Gwen, which I had to speak if I would
be truthful at all.

My last two hours were spent with Richard who
did the honours of his pretty little sitting-room very
zealously. He went and bought for the tea a fine
chocolate cake.

He looked such a fine, large, clean, straight lad, as
he swung along the road by my side, without coat,
hat or umbrella in spite of showers and only his
gown rolled up round his neck and shoulders. I was
a bit surprised to hear a "No" to all my games
questions cricket, football

I get the impression of a considerable dash of your
father of his simplicity and impulsiveness and of a
streak of the Irishman, which, of course, he gets from
his other side. A streak which tends to make him
intolerant and absolute about people and which
might lead to breaches and conflicts. But the lad is
clean and sound, and loves his mother dearly.

This time at Oxford has once more most vividly
impressed me with the extraordinary greater happi-
ness of the adult or even of the latter life soul: the
soul's life is, or at least can be, then so out of all pro-
portion fuller, richer, steadier, deeper than any young
thing can possibly attain. But how pathetic this makes
them! I told them in my address that I did not believe
humility was for young people at all. They, necessarily,
knew, had done, had experienced so little that they
could not yet know their immense limitations and
deficiencies. I do not say this of Richard because he
seems to me a modest lad.

Loving,

Father-Uncle.

92 Baron Von Hugel's

Child of my Heart, 4 May, 1920.

Have just had your pathetic little lines. I too am
overwhelmed with work. And your and my work is
just the same, if we learn to do it simply for God, simply
as, here and now, the one means of growing in love for
Him. To-day it is cooking, scrubbing; to-morrow it
may be utterly different: death itself will come in due
time, but, before it, still many a joy and many a
training. We will gently practise a genial concentra-
tion upon just the one thing picked out for us by God.
How this helps! How greatly we add to our crosses by
being cross with them! More than half our life goes
in weeping for things other than those sent us. Yet it
is these things, as sent, and when willed and at last
loved as sent, that train us for Home, that can form a
spiritual Home for us even here and now.

The Fiorettfs chapters are each complete in itself.
Five minutes would give you rich food. And didn't
St. Francis know such troubles as yours bigger than
yours, and didn't he just rise to them in all transforming
love!

Of course, Child, I love you, as much, I do believe,
as though I were your bodily father it is as though
that Great heart, your Father in God's other true
world, had been allowed, and had loved, to touch
my heart for you.

To-morrow I am sixty-eight, yet, thank God,, I feel
fresh and young in soul.

FROM LETTER OF 23 JUNE, 1020

Child of my old Heart, . . .
The wise way to fight antipathies is never to fight

Letters to a Niece 93

them directly turn gently to other sights, images,
thoughts, etc. If it the hate persists, bear it gently
like a fever or a toothache do not speak to it better
not speak of it even to God. But gently turn to Him
your love and life, and tell Him gently that you want
Him and all of Him: and that you beg for courage
whilst He thus leaves you dressed, or seeing yourself
dressed, in what you do not want to endorse as a will
decision, but only as purgation if so He wills. It is an
itch scratching makes it worse. Away out into God's
great world even if your immediate landscape is
just your unlovely antipathies.

Pray for your Uncle to become very, very humble
to disappear from one's own sight with just God
and souls; and one's little self one of these souls; how
glorious that would be.

Delighted you love St. C.: how real she was!

Loving old Uncle,
H.

GOURTFIELD, ROSS, HEREFORDSHIRE

Darling Gwen-Child, 10 August, 1920.

I want, though a bit late, to go over with you the
points the nooks and corners of your Odstock
environment and life. . . . And I want to finish up
by a good story or two and some facts, that may
awaken and amuse still further your anyhow lively
three.

As to Odstock, I greatly loved seeing, actually
living for a day with you, in that precise concrete
time and space condition in and through which my
child has to grow into Eternity and God the Ever

94 Baron Von HiigePs

Abiding. I so much cared for the Old Yew Inn, and
the genial old owner, who made himself very pleasant
to me as he drove me down towards the ever-graceful
spire of the cathedral, with his old, rather weary,
white pony. An excellent thing, having such a man
and such a conveyance for yourself and the children.
. . . Then I loved your room and, during that hour
or more I was there, I felt it was peopled with the
crowds of wholesome, peaceful apprehensions of the
Gwen-child. How it was here especially that Christ
and God helped and would help to turn isolation or
crowdedness, natural over-vehemence, pain, per-
plexity, pleasure and joy all all into gold, into love
of God and gradual assimilation to Himself. I was
especially glad to see that Crucifix there. Let people
say what they will, there never existed, there will
never exist, a symbol so deep, so comprehensive, so
realist and yet so ideal, of our august religion as
just simply the Crucifix. I once read an address by
the late Dean Stanley, in which that brilliant super-
ficiality denounced the Crucifix as a mediaeval skull-
and - crossbones grotesqueness, and contrasted this
morbid extravagance with the poetry and smiling
restraint of the Catacombs and their symbols Christ
as Orpheus, Christ as Good Shepherd, etc. As if the
admitted absence of the Crucifix there did not spring
from two very certain causes only the fear of giving
the Pagans any clear clue as to which is meant for
Christ (lest such acutely hostile Pagans should there-
upon deface or otherwise dishonour the image); and,
again, the fear lest those early, not yet traditionally
rooted Roman Christians, should have their faith
strained rather than strengthened by the presenta-

Letters to a Niece 95

tion of God hanging on the (Roman) gallows gallows
these (the Gross) which were employed only upon
slaves runaway or the like canaille.

And lastly, child, I so loved your little dim pre-
Reformation church so quiet and so devotional, so
placed as though made specially for Gwen. There you
can so well practise your institutionalism, your Holy
Communions; but also your special Recollections,
your Prayer of Quiet, and your praying for us all.
How I shall love it, if any keen trouble or deep joy
coming to you, you can and do run thither, whilst
it all is thus keen, to give it to, to share it with God
Christ! It is in that precise environment, by means
of those aids that you, Blessing, can and will become
deep and darling, humble and holy. There is simply
no obstacle, given God's grace and a good will, and for
these we will try and make our whole lives a prayer.

Loving old Father-Uncle,

F. v. Hiigel.

13 VICARAGE GATE

From Letter of 31 August, 1920.
My own darling Gwen,

Here I have a fine lot of things to talk to you about.
Two from you and three from myself. . . .

I am struck too at how the little regarded, the very
simple, unbrilliant souls souls treated by impatient
others as more or less wanting, are exactly pretty often
specially enlightened by God and specially near to
Him. And there, no doubt, is the secret of this striking
interconnection between an apparent minimum of

96 Baron Von Hugel's

earthly gifts and a maximum of heavenly light. The
cause is not that gifts of quick-wittedness, etc., are bad,
or are directly obstacles to Grace. No, no. But that
quite ordinary intelligence real slowness of mind
will quite well do as reflections of God's light, and that
such limitations are more easily accompanied by
simplicity, naiveness, recollection, absence of self-
occupation, gratefulness, etc., which dispositions are
necessary for the soul's union with God. Such souls
more easily approach action and more easily escape
activity.

A wonderful thoughtful friend insisted to me that
the soul's health and happiness depended upon a
maximum of zest and as little as possible of excite-
ment. est is the pleasure which comes from thoughts,
occupation, etc., that fit into, that are continuous,
applications, etc., of extant habits and interests of a
good kind duties and joys that steady us and give
us balance and centrality. Excitement is the pleasure
which comes from breaking loose, from fragmentari-
ness, from losing our balance and centrality. Zest is
natural warmth excitement is fever heat. For zest
to be relished requires much self-discipline and
recollection much spaciousness of mind: whereas
the more distracted we are, the more racketed and
impulse-led, the more we thirst for excitement and
the more its sirocco air dries up our spiritual sap and
makes us long for more excitement. . . .

And that "side-shows" queer things religiously that
what is not central, sober, balanced, may indeed still
help certain souls in certain ways; but that, for ourselves,

Letters to a Niece 97

we should carefully eschew being drawn into attending
to them, and thus weakening our own centrality.

But my Gwen-child will feed upon zest and zest-
bringing things, she will more and more become so
central that even if she lives thirty years more than
this old scribbler, she will be able with little or no
human encouragement to escape excitement, lop-
sidedness, oddity, etc. . . .

I write perhaps too emphatically because I am just now
suffering over a very bad lurch of a woman I know well
a strange bit of sheer thirst for change at any price; of
the weakness I have learnt sorrowfully to be prepared
suddenly to come up against, in almost any woman.

My own first point brings up once more a matter
we have often considered, but which I do not think
we can ever get too much cleared up. A friend of
mine, whom I have known for forty-five years, died
some days back, at seventy-six without any traceable
shred of religion (at least in the ordinary sense of the
word). He was a man of finely clean life, full of
philanthropy, genuine and costly, a cultivated man,
a scholar, also a man of naturally religious temper.
It is certainly impossible to know the depths of any
soul: yet certain points are once more clear to me,
over this further case that the agnostic tempest
which roared between say 1855 and 1875 was so
violent, that no wonder quick-witted lads went under,
many, many of them. That even so, the finer ones
managed to retain much that was high and right
even that was touchingly Christian but that they
owed this, not to Agnosticism, but to the Christian
faith, the tradition from which they had broken away
less than they themselves thought. And finally that,
K

98 Baron Von Hugel's

not only did they show faults or limitations who
does not? but that these limitations were readily
traceable to their Agnosticism. (I could easily draw
out the details of this in my friend.)

*

A matter of great delight to me just now is a charming,
most gentlemanly and cultivated young Japanese, who
speaks French and capital English, and who reads
difficult German books with ease a definite, indeed
fervent, Christian a Roman Catholic, who is finishing
his training for a Japanese Government (University)
Professorship of Philosophy. I am having a long talk
with him once a week. He mourns to me over the
intense materialism of his race and country, and
evidently feels keenly the need for the whole poor
modern world (aped by the Japs) to return to its
senses to God and the spiritual life as the true end of
man. He wants to be helped find the best means of
commending Christianity to such, at bottom, thorough
Easterns. But I want to concentrate rather upon getting
him to feel and to pursue still more precisely and
vividly than he does, the special genius, the driving
force of Christianity. I feel him that very, very rare
combination much intellect and still more soul! Pray
for him, and for the Loving old,

Fatherly Thing.

13 VICARAGE GATE, W.8

4 October, St. Francis's Day, 1920.

My ever darling Gwen-Child,

Here I am, at last, once more scribbling to you!
I have really not missed a single day on which I could

Letters to a Niece 99

have done so. First, there was the getting ready for
Oxford a big business, because one of us four paper
givers delayed everything by his absence abroad; then
returned to England to say that now (some changes
having occurred while news could not reach him) he
could not, and would not, join in; then let another
man write a paper in his stead; and then when this
poet thing had actually printed his hurried contribu-
tion, paff! came back into the game and gave us a
(fifth) paper after all! Then last week was very full
with Oxford our five little speeches, each one about
his own paper, and as to what he agreed and disagreed
with in the other four papers this on Sunday, 26
September, with Mr. Balfour in the chair and speaking
also, when we five had spoken. / made the first little
speech, but spoke, I was told, too fast and too shortly.
Then came a French professor, a good friend of mine,
a fervent Roman Catholic. The little speech was ex-
cellent in its substance, but, it was generally thought,
too mathematically demonstrative in method and tone.

Then followed Professor S , the man who had led

us such a life able but very unsatisfactory has,
somehow, quite lost the sense of what religion is, and
of why we so greatly need religion. Then came Prin-
cipal Jacks, head of the Unitarian College in Oxford,
who, on our subject, "The Relation between Morals
and Religion," had distressed me, by printing in
his paper that a belief in a Beloved Community (=a
Church without God) was quite equivalent, as a
motive for morality, to faith in God. In his speech
Dr. Jacks was chiefly busy with that very vague,
Pantheistic thinker, Professor Wildon Carr, and thus
busy in a smart journalistic sort of way. And finally

ioo Baron Von HugePs

came this Professor Wildon Carr very thin, very
abstract, a good bit hurt with Dr. Jacks. Mr. Balfour's
speech was beautiful. All morality, in the precise
degree of its depth and truth, consists in a continuous
and an increasing sacrifice of lower motives for higher
and ever higher motives. Yet we cannot, we do not,
make such great searching sacrifices for nothing, into
the blue. We make them, we can make them, only for
reality; and the highest motive, love, demands and
finds that Reality to be the highest possible Reality,
love, God. Hurrah!

It had been planned that then objections would be
raised to these six speeches; and that each of the six
speakers would have ten minutes for reply. But nothing
of this came about. For two Frenchmen now managed
to break in the one to explain and defend the non-
religious moral teaching in the French State school;
the other to try and show that, at all times, the French
State schools had taught a Positivism. Especially this
last, a tiny little man, was interminable, and quietly
continued his exposition twice after Mr. Balfour had
pulled him up for being beyond the time allotted to
us all. This meeting lasted three hours. Then on
Monday and Tuesday I saw many friends and new
acquaintances, mostly connected with the Congress.
And then on Tuesday evening my great friend,
Professor Kemp Smith of Edinburgh, came home here
with me for two nights. The two full days of his stay
required all my strength for my talks with him a
large, religious soul as well as a highly-trained intellect.

He said a number of striking things. That the age
of the largest spiritual mortality amongst men was
in middle life. That he had first been struck with this

Letters to a Niece 101

when a great gathering of all its past and present
students took place at Princeton University, U.S.A.
You had to pass over the young men, some of whom,
indeed, looked unsettled, uncertain, but not lost to
faith and heroism, and to move on to the men in their
forties: and, alas, how many self-centred, dried-up,
all-to-pieces, cynical countenances! Then what pierc-
ing insight into souls he has got! He talked of a culti-
vated, clean-lived ex-Roman Catholic priest whom
I also know, and whom the average man would, I think,
never feel to be anything but all right: "Why, the man
is all to pieces: the wish-wash of the newspapers
progress, etc. is all he knows or believes. All true
insight is gone." Then, too, this: "More and more
I am coming to see that the chief source of errors is
subjectivism, is distrust of, disbelief in, the natural,
normal intimations of our senses, of our reason, of
our conscience, of our religious sense." And when I
told him (brought up a Presbyterian) of how one of
the members of our "Religion" Society had recently
asked to be allowed to appear as a "D" "Detached,"
because he had ceased to find any use whatsoever,
for himself, in churches, sacraments, etc.: he, Kemp
Smith, shivered as though pierced by a sharp
instrument.

My Gwen: my doings have cost me a good deal:
I know why. The fact is that like all three of my
daughters, I have a very vehement, violent, over-
impressionable nature, which, on such occasions, gets
ridiculously over-roused, jarred, confused. Hence I have
then a big job (quite apart from all visible doings) to
drop, drop, drop all this feverishness, and to listen,
as docilely as I can, to think, will and pray, with

IO2 Ear on Von Hugel's

only "la fine pointe de 1'esprit," as St. Francois de
Sales and Fenelon never weary in recommending.
I tell you this, Child, because I am sure you are much
like that yourself, and hence may encourage you along
the same path of a most necessary stillness and peace.
The minute I at all attain to these dispositions, fruit-
fulness succeeds to fever. So with Gwen!

I have been thinking about and praying much to-day
for an American lady in far-away Chicago who has
been both comforting and alarming me by her entirely
unsolicited communications three in number that
she is the now fifty-three-years-old wife of a university
professor a man of nobly clean life and spiritual
mind, but no definite religious belief whatsoever
and mother to four children, of twenty- three, seventeen,
fourteen and seven; that till some two years ago she
herself was an Agnostic; that then, more and more,
St. Catherine of Genoa, in my Mystical Elements,
seized hold of her, and the instinct that she might
still come to believe much, if only she attained to
much humility and to much love of God's poor; and,
now, that she had fairly made up her mind to submit
to Rome to-day, on St. Francis's Day, she a Frances.
Her very Protestant, touching mother-in-law was in
this my room with me, a week or so ago, to speak her
mind and to draw out my own. Both to the daughter-
in-law in Chicago and to the mother-in-law in London
I said: that neither in that book nor in my life did
I, or do I aim at making Roman Catholics: that
would be odious presumption. That God and His
grace are (in various degrees, no doubt) everywhere
but specially, very especially, in Christianity. That
the presumption is always in favour of souls remaining,

Letters to a Niece 103

as to institutional appurtenance, where they are it
being God's affair to make it clear to them if, doing
their best where they are, He wants them elsewhere.
That no aesthetic, etc., attraction, no preference are
enough: that only the sense of obligation in and for
the particular soul should decide. The dear old lady
was very touching, but I saw quickly that even the
bare possibility that her daughter-in-law could be
seeking anything but services more gorgeous than
were those of the Ritualists, etc., did not, doubtless
could not, enter her head. So then I told her I had a
darling Niece who had found God and Christ and
Church oh, so really; and that I loved to help her
all I could without a thought of her moving. That
I would gladly help, if I could, in a similar way,
with her daughter-in-law. Still, that we really cannot,
can we? become other people's conscience. The dear
old thing thereupon seemed satisfied with my declaring
that I well understood how very much she disliked
Rome; how sad and hurt she was, etc. To the
daughter-in-law I wrote that my Niece had an Anglican
clerical adviser of a deeply Catholic mind, and more
spiritual assuredly than any but the finest (the rare)
Roman Catholic trainers. And that's true, my Gwen.

Loving old Uncle,
H.

13 VICARAGE GATE, KENSINGTON

My ever darling Child, 26 October, 1920.

Again late, but again not in fault as to this lateness
brain gets feverish as soon as ever I add even such
a scribble as this to any considerable work and my

IO4 Baron Von Hugef's

work, or rather my jobs, have been considerable since
I last wrote. But I loved getting your second letter;
and you must never, please, await an answer from me,
if you have something further to say, and find the time
to say it in.

I am delighted you are about to get this, your first
real Retreat; and I do not doubt that you will be
greatly refreshed and braced by it. No doubt, a
Retreat depends somewhat upon the Giver of it; yet
it really depends far more upon the simplicity and
generosity of the soul that makes the Retreat. I am
sure you already know well that you must evade all
straining, all vehemence, all, as it were, putting your
nerves into it. On the contrary the attention wanted
is a leisurely expansive one a dropping gently of all
distractions, of obsessions, etc. "La fine pointe de
P esprit, " that is the instrument of progress, the recipient
of Graces. This old scribbler how much of that
dropping, evading, gently waiting as against his
interior vehemences and uproar, a sterile and sterilis-
ing restlessness he has to practise! Yet the practice
shows him plainly (in the long run) that that is what
good sense and God want of him: peace and power
come that way and only that way.

I know too that you well understand that you should
never strain never directly strive to like people. Just
merely drop or ignore your antipathies. There, again,
I have been having hurricanes of antipathies well, to
keep quietly ignoring all that rumpus that is all that
God asks. And we then grow, through, and on occasion
of, these involuntary vehemences they keep us humble
and watchful and close to God. I would suggest, too,
especially for the Retreat time, not to make too many

Letters to a Niece 105

or too complicated resolutions; or rather, on the last
day, to cut down the number of these reached by, say,
a half. The remainder will probably be as much as
you can wisely attend to out of Retreat, till next
retirement.

The American lady is to reach London on Saturday
night 30 October, and she leaves for America on
13 November. She writes from Paris and says she is
much looking forward to talks with me. She is evidently
a very genuine and sincere, but also a very unusual
woman. She writes that she has no attraction either
to God or to Christ that in these directions she is
perplexed; but that the one thing thac draws and
feeds her is the Church the assembly of believers
throughout the world. In Paris she spends as much
time as possible in the churches, amidst the wor-
shippers that this somehow infects her with faith.
She has all her life (fifty-three years old now) been an
Agnostic; but this, somehow, breaks that spell! I tell
her that very certainly the Church is for Christ and
God, and not vice versa very certainly. Yet that,
after all, she loves the Church because it infects her
with belief. Hence, she wants to believe, and delights
in belief when it comes, and the belief is evidently
not simply belief in the Church (is such a thing
possible?), but belief in what the Church believes
in Christ, in God.

She did not take the move on 4 October that she
thought she was likely to take. But evidently still
that is in her mind. I shall, however, understand her
case more definitely when I have seen her. I am
proposing to her, our first meeting should be on
All Saints' at early Mass, with a talk after breakfast.

io6 'Baron Von HtigePs

My Sweet, of course you will be most welcome here
on 5 November. We can, I hope, have a good talk
afterwards.

I am so glad you begin your Retreat on All Saints'
my favourite Feast the Feast not only of all the
heroic lovers of God that have ever lived, but the
Feast of single, heroic, supernatural acts, even if and
where they remained single. May that darling glow,
that genial sunshine of the saints, with Christ their
King in their midst, deepen, widen, sweeten, expand,
steady this darling little child! And pray for us all,
Dearie!

Of course a second weekly Holy Communion
would be excellent; but this must not be forced.
God will provide reasonably easy means, if that is
His will.

Loving old Uncle,

F. v. Hiigel.

13 VICARAGE GATE, KENSINGTON, W.8

My darling Child, 23 November, 1920.

I loved your letter of 15 November very much. And
now I must really try to answer its points, where these
invite an answer, and to tell you the chief things that
I have been learning from various happenings since
my last.

i. I feel with you that a very big question is that
whether or not to keep up your violin. Indeed, next
to your elementary religious practices and attending
to the children, I can find none as big. I am only sorry
that it should have to be a question at all you know

Letters to a Niece 107

well how I deliberately put your non-religious readings
after the fiddling. I could not give you a bigger proof
of the importance I attach to that violining; for as you
know, I believe much in the utility, also and especially for
one's religion, of such an alternation of non-religious
study. I have often explained this to you; and my life
witnesses to its truth to me every day.

A pity that the problem has always to be "two and
a half hours a day of practice or none." For you could
doubtless get in an hour or an hour and a half without
any crush. Yet I quite understand that it really has
to remain at that alternative.

Well, I only hope much that you will, somehow, be
able to retain the fiddling those two and a half hours,
even if it means no non-religious reading and possibly
also the abandonment of one or other regular occupa-
tion besides. I am sure your music is worth it already,
from its effect upon your happiness. So I trust you will
be given light, not to abandon it, but how, without
any dereliction of any real duty, to keep it regularly
in your life.

And if Richard really takes to music for life and for
his livelihood: there is another, big reason for keeping
up your music fully.

2. I am very glad you are again visiting the poor
people I am sure you have real gifts that way. I have
always much regretted that my deafness has so crippled
me in that direction. I feel as if it would have done
me much good, even though I am not sure whether
I would have had gifts that way.

3. As to the Fenelon, I am ever so glad that you love
him so. But indeed I felt sure you would. But I kept
him. back till now because I always fear as to him just

io8 Baron Von HugeFs

only one thing: that the reader may have too little
experience of spiritual things to perceive, under all
that apparent ease and suave simplicity, the masses of
spiritual experience and of religious wisdom. But you
by now have sufficient experience to bring to him, to
perceive what lots and lots he brings to you.

Among the letters I feel that perhaps those which
will suit you most and will teach you most are the
letters to Soeur Charlotte de S. Gyprien. Oh, what a
lot I owe to them; they are often, often gently ringing
through my soul. The biographical "Notice" will have
made you realise her as an ex-Huguenot a woman
of great mind and the toughest will, but naturally
haughty, contemptuous of the average, requiring (as
my Gwen-child does) to learn to lose herself in and for
the average. If God, if Christ, loves men and who can
doubt it? He loves the average very much the poor
little virtue, the poor little insight. How splendidly
Fenelon feels in her a certain unchristian aristocratical-
ness of mind she was evidently a sort of Dean Inge
in petticoats. Mind, Sweet, you bathe in, you saturate
yourself with, those letters !

Then there are those letters to the two dukes (Che-
vreuse and Beauvilliers) : what grand direction as to
how to lead a very full and yet a leisurely life! Do you
notice there, St. Catherine's "one thing at a time"?
And here there is also the insistence upon doing this
one thing always with a certain environment of peace,
of non-hurry around it. I find this double practice
of golden worth; and, in getting up of a morning,
I gently plan the day's doings, not too many of them
for the application to them of Fenelon's treatment.
(One has, of course, to be ready to modify one's

Letters to a Niece 109

scheme, as sudden, unexpected duties crop up in the
day. But, even so, that gentle scheme is useful.)

Do you notice one very wonderful thing in Fenelon?
It is the combination of a rarely light (not frivolous)
a light and elastic open temperament with an earnest
will and gently concentrated determination. People as
determined and as ardent as he, usually are, or become,
heavy, rigoristic. And again, people as light and
elastic as he, usually are, or become, frivolous and
corrupt. By that combination the earnestness without
rigorism he always strikes me as belonging, in his
measure, to that minority of Christian teachers who
have reached closest to that same combination in
Our Lord Himself to have caught up a few drops of
that genial rain, that royally generous west wind, that
gently drops and brightly blows through the virile
sunshine of His love. St. Francis is another, - and, of
course, a much greater instance of that delightful
paradox. The future of religion, indeed even already
its present propagation in our poor old world, lie in it.

4. You are doubtless unable to keep on with the
Herodotus, that may be able to come some time later.
Oh, I love him much: he is so childlike, so quaint, so
wholesome, a little like a Greek prose Chaucer, I think.
And then his general tone is so truly religious; what a
dread he has of all arrogance, and of its blinding effects
and inevitable terrible falls!

5. As to Mrs. , she went off to America on

Saturday, 13 November. We had four long talks,
besides meeting twice in church. I think she will
really persevere and will greatly grow, for she is
deeply humble and very anxious to become still more
so, and possesses a remarkable self-knowledge knows

no Baron Von HilgeTs

how to distinguish what in herself is a surface mood
and what is underlying, often very different genuine
substance. So on the evening of her first Holy Com-
munion day, she said, with a mischievous smile:
"I trust and believe I shall never lose this my new,
fuller light: you see, I do not think I have ever felt so
Protestant as I have done to-day!" But I wish (it is
only a peripheral matter) that she did not put her
political radicalism so high in her scheme of things.

13 VICARAGE GATE, W.8

From Letter of 8 December, 1920.

My darling Gwen-Child,

I have to thank you for three very dear good letters
as always very welcome and very carefully read. I
think the following points are those I see clear about,
or as to which I have facts worth reporting about.

i. As to Fenelon. I am delighted you love him so.
He is one of the, say, half-dozen of the non-Scriptural
writers who has helped me most directly and most
copiously in my own interior life a life requiring
immensely that daily, hourly, death to self. I believe
that less keen and violent natures can get harm from
him; phlegmatic, drifting, inert temperaments could
take him wrong way on. But I doubt whether he
himself, the living man, ever harmed any soul he tried
to help, and he was too amazingly penetrative of the
particular soul before him thus to harm. The only
possible exception is, / think, his cousin, Madame Guyon :
possibly by his disciple attitude towards her, he did,

Letters to a Niece 1 1 1

as a matter of fact, help her to become still more the
Quietist than she would have been without him.
Certainly it was for the purpose of covering her
exceedingly vague and wool-gathering expressions that
in his Explications des Maximes des Saints he strained
his own language, and got censured by Rome for
such terms. But then I have never taken him in that
livre manque, but in these letters; and again in these
letters, as a man of immense action and persevering,
energising of will, addressing souls too vehement and
too intense, taken like this I have found him tremen-
dously helpful. Do not hurry to return these four
volumes. . . .

I am sending you three other volumes of the Corre-
spondence the letters to his family and the mixed
letters. This because I have found that his helpfulness
was greatly increased by my realising him as a tho-
roughly flesh and blood, naturally faultful individual,
and as a man to whom God was not sparing of much,
much trial and purification. . . . They do, you will
find, humanise, concretise one's image of him greatly,
and here and there appears a letter, perhaps as many
as a dozen all told, which really are spiritual letters.
Also pray specially notice and read and re-read
M. Tronson's letters: that good soul, the trainer of
Fenelon at S. Sulpice. Pray note Tronson's austerity
and immense ideal for Fenelon, and his piercing analysis
of his natural faults. A fine example of what I so
want my Child to grasp vividly, and for good and all,
that usually one thoroughly trained spiritual soul has
in the background another trained spiritual soul as
its trainer.

2. As to Du Bose. I want you, Dearie, first of all to

ii2 Baron Von Hugel's

realise that Du Bose is not up to this his swan's
song -one of my men at all. His books are treated as
gospels by many young High Anglican clerics. But
they deeply dissatisfy me. Three ideas are with him
throughout; and I am very confident that all three
are gravely mistaken and highly impoverishing.

(i.) God and man are in the whole work of sancti-
fication, salvation, etc., on a strict parity. God's action
never extends farther than man's action. They are not
only both wanted in some degree: right! But they are
both, in actual fact, always and necessarily equal in
depth and in breadth. What stuff, what blasphemy!

(ii.) The possibility of Sin is a necessary part of
Liberty as such. In sheer thought, in the very nature
of things, to be free to do and be good, is to be free
and do the reverse evil. No and again no. To be
able to do, to be evil, is a defect, a restriction on
liberty. Perfect liberty always spontaneously, joyously
wills its own perfect nature. We should feel humbled,
not only by our actual sins, but already by the fact
that we can commit such things. (This alone cuts the
ground from under all the Byronisms as childish
unreason.)

(iii.) There is an element of potential evil in God
Himself. (This follows, of course, inevitably from
No. ii.) No and again No. You know how I try to
account for the existence of evil in the world, but
even if I were wrong in my particular solution for
the existence of evil Du Bose's should be fought to
the death.

Du Bose has still further notions hardly more sound
than these. But these are surely enough. You will see

Letters to a Niece 113

then that, not as a further specimen of a teaching I
believe in, but, on the contrary, as a first pathetically
late instance of a sound spiritual yearning in contrast
with painfully reckless or at least inadequate theoris-
ings, I have loved the strain (the strain more than the
actual words) of this paper, in so far as it hungers for
the Church.

By the way, the sad unsatisfactoriness of Du Bose's
own all but life-long subjectivist Protestantism, helps
me to see how little ideal is that abounding in its own
sense of each of the sound currents of Protestantism
which Du Bose even in this paper tries to make out
to be somehow really satisfactory. In reality each soul
requires centrality, inclusiveness, balance, sobriety,
immense reverence. Its errors may get counterbalanced
in the course of history and for mankind at large by
the contrary errors, or its incompleteness may be made
up for by the contrary incompletenesses of other souls.
Well but what about this soul itself? As to the par-
ticular sentence you quote as to the Church as the only
Christ in which we are and we can do anything by
Him and for Him I think you have spotted a seriously
excessive phrase. The Church is not Christ is no
more Christ than it is God. We require God and
Christ and Church: each in and with the other. But
it ruins the whole richness, indeed the truth, of the
outlook, if any one of these especially if the Church
is simply identified with either of the other two. But
there you have just a small touch of Du Bose's weak-
ness, which in his books runs riot he overstates till
he meets, implies, the very opposite of what he started
out to defend.

As to your own Church appurtenance. I want to say very

ii4 Baron Von Huge! V

simply and definitely what I have long felt with you,
Child, but what I have, perhaps, rather implied than
at any time expressed en toute lettre that I find God
in His goodness has given you a very a sensitively
Catholic mind; that I never think of you, feel you as
a Protestant at all, but as an elementary, inchoate,
deep Catholic soul. I think you really seize upon
and feed upon those doctrines and practices in Angli-
canism which, thank God, are Catholic, and there's
an end on't and that you instinctively shrink from
what may be un-Catholic or even anti-Catholic there,
especially in the vigorous kite-flying which some junior
Anglicans somehow love to practise. The latter part
of the sentence means that I believe traditional High
Anglicanism the stock that Edward Talbot springs
from, contains really but little that is not Catholic. It
is not complete, but it is, in its positive teaching, upon
the whole, most consolingly Catholic.

Now I must admit that when I began trying to help
you spiritually, I felt it might be my duty, or at least
the wiser course, to give you, and encourage you in,
not Roman Catholic books, but Anglican ones. This
might help to keep you from thinking of Rome. But
then I saw, on careful examination, that I had no even
indirect intention to woo you for Rome, through your
spiritual reading. I simply wanted to give you the
best, the strongest, food for your soul. Was I really
to eschew what I believe to be best, simply because it
might indirectly awaken comparisons, misgivings, etc. ?
As a point of detail I had thought of starting you on
Newman's Parochial and Plain Sermons certainly classics
and well known to me. But then these sermons are
rigorist how they have depressed me! Just the

Letters to a Niece 115

opposite from Fenelon, who always braces me. And
really, I cannot allow you to be depressed at least
I cannot organise depression for you! But William
Law, and recently Dean Church, have written spiritual
things that are not depressing, and that, some time,
you might read with profit. However, High Anglicans
themselves live largely upon the books I have recom-
mended to you. Indeed, I know some such who would
be indignant with me for not considering these books
as somehow really Anglican. After all, you can and
will just feed on what truly helps you there to love
God and Christ, and to hate, and constantly to guard
against self. All this will fit in beautifully with your
praying in the little church your Holy Communion
there and in the cathedral. I think your thoughts at
times about Rome as possibly for yourself probably
are a good deal a wish to be at one with your old
uncle. But I have already explained how truly I feel
ourselves at one. And short of a very clear light that
you must join, that it would be sin not to, you might
easily cross over and find yourself less at one with me
than now. Now you are getting the finest Church
teachings and figures in these books and the weak-
nesses, the humannesses of Anglicans furnish a foil.
Then you would be environed by the poor average,
with its weaknesses and humannesses very real there
also. Hence I would have you, my Sweet, do
your very best where you are, with what you there
can get; taking care only not to fix yourself up nega-
tively I mean against Roman Catholicism. Consider
it simply as what, even if the fuller truth, does not
concern you now perhaps never will. After all it is
a truth which, in large part, you are living already,

1 1 6 Baron Von Hugel 7 s

and which you can and will live more and more,
without any shutting up of yourself.

Loving old Uncle-Father,

F. v. H.

I was so sorry about the headache, but glad about
the peace. Death and Peace Good!

FROM LAST WRITING OF LAST DAY OF

But indeed, above all, it will be your love of them
in and for Christ your love of and union with Him,
which will keep or gain them for God. After all, every
soul, boy or girl, as they grow up, have to pass through
that delicate difficult crisis, when they themselves
have deliberately to will the right and God. Even
when the training and example have been perfect, and
when the natural character is specially good. And, of
course, it is your call to work for, and be ready, and be
by, those three and their father also. From prayer and
solitude back to them, and from them again back to
it: and with them much in your prayer and your prayer
much in them there is a fine rich tension for you.
Bless you, Child, for 1921.

Loving old,

Fatherly One.

13 VICARAGE GATE, KENSINGTON, W.8.

29 January-2 February, 1921.
My darling Gwen-Child,

I think of you as back at Odstock, and, in any case,
ready for a letter. I have had to be a bit long before

Letters to a Niece 117

getting to this one, but have not a bit forgotten you,
Dear. There are three things or four that I specially
want to write about this time.

1 . Your music. I still await light on this point. For,
on the one hand, it does look as if the necessary amount
of violin practice were straining to the head; yet, on
the other hand, this music-producing is such a unique
vehicle of self-expression for you. I should be so loth
to see you give it up. The crux of the difficulty lies
evidently in the amount the large amount of practice
necessary for your otherwise stiff fingers. If, say, an
hour or an hour and a half a day were sufficient that
would not seriously strain the head. But then you
seem to be sure that that would not be enough! I do
not feel that the possible impossibility of keeping up
that full orchestra for performances in the cathedral
need decide the matter. For though it is, of course,
specially inspiring to play thus in God's house indeed
in one of the old cathedrals yet it would not, surely,
be impossible this failing for your organist friend
to get up chamber-concerts, quartets, in which you
would be first (sole first) violin concerts which, of
course, could be for some solid charity, and which could
be spiritually intentioned by my Gwen-child.

2. A couple of attempts to help souls seem to have
gone awry with me just now: I mention the cases
because you too will, sooner or later, doubtless yourself
have more or less similar experiences. One was of an
Italian man friend of about forty-five an immense
reader and somewhat intemperately speculative mind
a man who came back to Christianity, indeed to
the Roman Catholic Church, from wildly secularist
Socialism some eight years ago. I had built great

1 1 8 Baron Von Huge I 's

hopes of rare help for him from a Jesuit Retreat which
I suggested his making for now about a year. At last
he went and made one, the other day. But the priest
who gave him the Retreat, an American, though a
very good man, rather turned it into a series of theo-
logical speculations or discussions than that he kept
it, and made it, into directly practical instructions in
prayer, meditation, training of the conscience, dis-
covery and reformation of personal faults, etc. which
is, of course, the direct object and function of a Retreat.
I do not think those four full days have damaged my
man, but they fed just his speculative bent, which
I hoped would be starved, and have starved his
devotional needs and chances, which I hoped would
be fed. Ah, well God may be offering him chances
I do not see or know of. He is a well-intentioned man,
and God will bless even unlikely-looking happenings.
Then there is a young English lady artist, who
adored her mother, who had no religion, or who had
lost what she had had. This damsel came to stay for
three nights a few days ago, and to our surprised
pleasure seemed definitely religious in her outlook
(a thing which had appeared to us to be sadly lacking
in her). And she wrote me so enthusiastic a letter
about my Christianity and the Supernatural especially as
to my tact with young people that I thought I could
and ought to say something about religion to her, so
I wrote her a careful answer dwelling on the import-
ance of cultivating this her religious sense, just as she
cultivated her artistic sense; on the great Jewish-
Christian-Mohammedan tradition of prayer for the
dead, which she might get into the habit of for her
mother; and on the great importance of, whenever

Letters to a Niece 119

reasonably possible, only preliminary judgments. This
last point because I had tried to introduce her to
Browning's poetry entirely unknown to her till I
read aloud to her some six of his noblest easier pieces;
and had found that she judged straight away and
finally and with an angry hostility. As I pointed out,
she could not, at that stage, know more than that, so
far, she did not like him after all, a very small fact,
and one that might well be overcome on further
acquaintance with writings which seniors of hers, well
qualified to judge, had come to reckon of the rarest
depth and richest delight. But this letter was answered
by a curt, dry little note, telling me she had done all
the things I proposed, now during several years. I was
glad in a way, for surely even without any self-know-
ledge she must know whether or not she has gone to
Holy Communion, often, indeed if possible every
Sunday, and whether she has done at least fifteen
minutes' spiritual reading every day. But then it was
strange to note that she said "all the things," whilst
it is clear that the suspense-of-any-avoidable-final-
judgment practice had certainly not been done for
several years. Ah, well; it does not follow that that
letter was no use at all; and, in any case, one did
one's little best.

3. Three dear friends have died since I last wrote
two of them quite old: fine old Dr. Alexander Whyte,
the Presbyterian Edinburgh preacher and writer, a
man with much of the Catholic mind in surroundings
which made its utterance difficult; and fine old Lady
Stawell (pronounced Stowell), the widow of an
Australian official, a sweet, strong serene Anglican, a
devoted Christian. She had many a trouble; but her

I2O Baron Von Hugel's

heroic resignation to God's holy Will, her generous
and strongly gentle application of her faith to her
entire life and dispositions never left her to the last;
and when I saw her lying dead on Sunday the coun-
tenance was indeed beautiful in its triumphant
spirituality. These two friends were respectively in
their middle eighties and late nineties. But the third
friend was only fifty; and he was carried off instan-
taneously by angina pectoris. He was a very devoted,
very popular, immensely active Jesuit priest the man
who gave me hospitality in the Jesuit house of studies
these last four years at Oxford. He was essentially a
man of action, full of social service work. Well, that is
necessary too necessary that some, with the gift for
it, should labour much at it. His devoted bulldog
Jimmy is sure to feel his master's death deeply: they
were inseparables, day and night.

13 VICARAGE GATE

5 February, 1921.

I think five to seven on the fourteenth will be best
for me have me freshest for you. And Aunt Mary will
love to have you to tea at four-thirty. I would have
mine alone at that time, and we could thus start at
five, having satisfied our lower wants.

But this is specially to wish you a very deep and
devoted, a very peaceful and epanoui birthday. What
shall I wish you specially for the coming year for
all the years of your life? I will wish you the ever-
increasing practice of just the kind of moderation,
alternation, mixedness, which you are already seeing

Letters to a Niece 121

and practising. It is the moderation of yourself in
all things especially also in your religion and in
your very prayer; your always occupying a very
appreciable part of your clock-time and direct atten-
tion with not-directly, religious things; and this pre-
cisely because of, and for, God; to ensure stability,
sobriety, genuine detachment also, especially, in the
deepest things and joys. This practise and organise,
this make instinctive: and you will persevere to the
end, you will grow more and more spiritual and
holy; you will gain solid joy: you will become utterly
true and elastic and accessible. Even at seventy, in
such a life, "vainly the flesh fades, soul makes all
things new."
Holy Communion, for you, to-morrow.

Fatherly One,
H.

8 February, 1921.

I had intended, Child, not to write again before we
meet on the fourteenth. But I had forgotten that
already to-morrow is Ash Wednesday Lent beginning!
So I write this little card to say that we will both of
us, will we not? make our Lenten penitence consist
primarily in the ever gently renewed dropping of
our several over-intensenesses, and in as gently and
really adaptably as we can, accepting, fitting into,
the rubs and jolts, the disappointments and dreari-
nesses which God in His merciful training of us may
allow or send us. And we will both add to this central
chief thing just one or two little renunciations. Am
dropping my after-dinner fruit and all book-buying
till Easter. You may be able to start some little thing

122 Ear on Von Huget's

like that to-morrow. And for the rest, the darling poor,
the open air, the Greek books, the dear dog, and any
duty that may come to hand; all penetrated by your
Holy Communions and an expansive, humble joy.

Fatherly One.

13 VICARAGE GATE, KENSINGTON

Ever darling Child Mine, 22 February, 1921.

I got your last letter yesterday morning, and though
it was (as far as you yourself, your dispositions and
affections go) as dear as ever you are, it nevertheless
through no fault of yours, but through much stupidity
of my own gave me grave distress and uneasiness.
You see, as I have told you many a time, the biggest
cross of my little old life which God has deigned to
train by not a few trials, was when (all unintentionally,
indeed for long quite unwittingly, but none the less
really) I myself, so to speak, put out my True*s spiritual
eyes. I myself, who had chiefly trained her in faith
and trust and love of God and Christ and Church, so
strained and perplexed that very sensitive young soul
that her very love of me and her natural openness to
all impressions from me, bereft her for years of all
faith or at least of all peace, of all conscious faith.
As I also told you, I had the immense consolation of
seeing her come back fully, even before she married,
of seeing with my own eyes in Rome, her darling,
utterly, deeply spontaneously Christian and Catholic
faith, love, life and death. She knew well, of course,
how little comfort I should gain by any even of this,
if there was in it anything to suggest that it was done

Letters to a Niece 123

in an attempt to please me: if what is essentially a free,
self-responsible act and donation was performed even
from such a touching but quite inadequate motive.
Yet she knew, of course, what a unique joy it would
give me if I could see here on earth my miserable
blind work undone. And so, when she became just
ill enough to receive Extreme Unction, she turned to
me so darlingly, "Oh, Papa, what a grace, what a
joy, to receive a further Sacrament of the Church."
I knew exactly why she thus turned, first to me. And
then she pressed for, she got permission, to receive
this Sacrament again, and was, the sweet, a little hurt
that I did not seem to her as utterly assured of her
love in so receiving it, as she wanted me to be, and as
she knew I well could be. And so, of course, also with
her confession, and above all with Holy Communion:
but with these the evidence of her full return to the
Catholic faith and practice had been before me for
some eight or nine years. Now, Sweet: since my True
died, I do not think I have cared to try and serve and
feed any soul as much as yours. My chief prayer has
been that I might never strain, never complicate,
never perplex you, and that in a Fenelon-like self-
oblivion I might just simply help and feed and carry
you, if and when and where you required it to let
God lead. Well, Sweet, up to this last interview I
think (with doubtless many little imperfections) God
mercifully helped me to do what I believe He wanted
me to do. But I suppose I was getting to count on my
poor little insight or other highly-limited capacities,
and it was time I should have a wholesome humilia-
tion. I feel sure that this is good for me. But may I not
have done any permanent harm to you, Child mine!

124 Baron Von Hugefs

I mean: may I not have conveyed impressions so
vivid that (however erroneously, they have so shaped
and affected your mind) I cannot now seriously
modify them? I will try, as surely is my clear duty,
presently. But I want first to get three smaller points
out of the way.

1. As to health and music. I am so sorry about the
neuritis in the right arm, and the (of course inevitable)
suspension of all violining. You will indeed be wise
if you suspend or sufficiently moderate or modify
whatever else may now tire or strain you. In this
way you will soon get well again. And meanwhile you
need not, need you? make any definite decisions as
to the music. For I take it, that once in your average
health again, you could manage an hour to an hour
and a half a day without any marked physical dis-
advantage.

2. As to your mother's questions. It must be some
twenty-five years ago that your mother once began to
write me about some marriage matter and asking
some question, I forget what. I answered her as plainly
as she had asked. And it tried me a good bit after, later
on, when I found that she had told several of her friends
about my answer as very odd as a sort of queer
joke yet, what a sweet woman she is with such
dear darling qualities! So, though I have, since then,
been always reluctant to answer questions of hers,
I wish her nothing but good, and would like to help
her when and where I solidly can do so.

(i.) As to the Virgin Birth. I always find most help
myself by dwelling upon the very early, the contem-
porary conviction of our Lord's sinlessness something

Letters to a Niece 125

quite different and distinct from all and every other
human holiness: and upon the consequent early feel-
ing and belief that One thus sinless must have been,
so to speak, the Beginning of a fresh creation of God,
and cannot have been linked just simply as all other
human children with at most only holy, in general
sinful, never sinless, ordinary human beings. This is
doubtless the deepest reason also for all the honour
paid to His Mother.

(ii.) As to the Eucharistic Bread and Wine turned into

the Body amd Blood of Christ. I take it that what repels

her here is this apparent treating Christ as though He

were divisible, and a divisible thing, and as though we

literally ate and drank parts of Him. But any such

notion is excluded by the very general doctrine of

"concomitance" (=going together), by which, Christ,

being not dead but alive, not a thing or things, but

a Person: where His (risen and glorified) Body and

Blood are, there also are His soul and His Divinity,

each penetrating, and interpenetrated by, the other.

The reasons why, especially in St. John's Gospel,

chapter vi., the Body and the Blood, and the eating

and drinking, are so strongly emphasised is to ensure

the very important faith in the strict and entire reality

of Our Lord's Presence a reality greater or different

from His ordinary Presence in our hearts a reality

closely connected with the physical eating and the

physical drinking of those species the Eucharistic

elements. Of course it is possible to have too carnal a

conception of the meaning of this doctrine. Yet I do

not doubt that upon the whole the danger lies far

more in an evaporation of the Presence into no more

than the universal Presence of Christ, or even into

126 Baron Von Huge/'s

a mere vague subjective thought of Him as though
present.

(iii.) As to the difficulty of caring for, and of fer-
vently attending, Matins or Evensong, I quite under-
stand it, I think. But I would dearly love to see you
battle quietly against it, whilst using every reasonable
means to enliven your attention and interest. If the
services are somewhat long, yet their contents, especially
the Psalms are admirable. Why not get to understand
the Psalter very well? I mean not simply more or less
by heart, but, on the contrary, by learning to see more
clearly and more constantly the original meaning, the
first state of soul, in them. You will get in a few days
from me the late Canon Driver's beautifully precise
re-translation from the Hebrew of all the Psalms
each printed on the page opposite to that on which
the Revised Psalter stands printed. I should love you
very slowly and ruminatingly to go through the
whole perhaps slightly marking with pencil under
the words of the Psalms, in your Prayer Book, where
Driver has taught you the precise original meaning
where the Prayer Book text is obscure. This would
bring rich life and deep feeling into them, or rather
would reveal to you the life and the feeling. Our own
Mass and Benediction, and especially Vespers and
Compline, are, of course, filled with various Psalms.
So also for understanding our, the great old Latin
services, a sound knowledge of the Psalter is very
useful. Then I look forward to the days, off and on,
when with others, you would have a companion at
these services. This would break and limit the
isolation a good bit. ...

These difficulties are all so many additional special

Letters to a Niece 127

reasons for your holding out, even if you mostly have
to go alone. But, Sweet, you would, of course, practise
moderation in the matter; going, as you do, to Holy
Communion at least once a week, and praying by
yourself, as you do, in your little church by yourself.
I do not see that you need have more than Evensong
on the Sundays: that is supposing you get Holy
Communion every Sunday morning.

And now at last I come to the biggest thing in your
letter: what you say about liberty, freedom, in the
Roman Catholic Church. I sadly realise that, given
my remarks, or rather given the sheer fact of my
raising the point to you at all the other day, you
could not at least if you followed me then in your
usual sweetly receptive way think at all differently.
For if your own freedom would not, by becoming a
Roman Catholic, get curtailed, where would be the
object of my raising the point to you at all? It must
have concerned yourself; and if it did not concern
you, where lies the excess in your conclusion, from,
indeed in, your simple reproduction of my words?
I see this quite plainly, Child. But I soon felt very
uncomfortable, you gone, as to what I had said.
I know I spoke with edge and concentration, and
I have waited anxiously to see its reception by you.
Be a dear child now, and drop what I said then,
attending simply to what I will write now.

First then, there can be no serious question of any
curtailment of any right and reasonable freedom
such freedom as you practise now in your reading,
studying, thinking if ever you became a Roman
Catholic. I have deliberately gone through all the
duties, all even the chances and influences that would

128 Baron Fon

then surround you, and I can discover no such cur-
tailment, either certain, or even probable. Of course,
you would yourself have a wide choice of confessors,
devotions, spiritual books, religious habits; and if you
yourself chose, or you let yourself go to vehement
reaction against all your past, even where (as, thank
God, it is) very good and wise: you could work your
appurtenance to the Churdi in an impoverishing
way. But that would be your own doing; and already
you see far too plainly how central must always be
and remain the dropping of all excess and vehe-
mence, for such a danger to be at all near or likely.
If you were a man, and a critical historian and
philosophical thinker, and these activities occupied
with religion, not simply reproductive or selective,
but original and reconstructive, the question of free-
dom would occur. But note, my Sweet, that not only
it does not it really does not occur for yourself: it gets
answered by me, with whom it does, it cannot but
occur, in the sense opposite to that in which you
answer it for yourself. I deliberately admit some
difficulty, some complication for such as myself; but
I do not cease, thank God, to see and experience that
the gain of my Roman Catholic appurtenance is, even
simply for the solidity of my freedom, for the balance
and reality of my outlook -just simply even to my life
of scholarship and thinking IMMENSE. I know it is. So that
I am sure that you are doubly removed from any
real curtailment of your liberty, if ever you came to
the Roman Catholic Church: for you are not a scholar,
a thinker, by profession and, even if you were, you
could, and ought, and would gain a depth and breadth
of rich liberty beyond what you could acquire else-

Letters to a Niece 129

where. You can see that, as to men like myself, this
is my real conviction. How else could you explain my
always keeping open in my mind the possibility and
desirableness of Professor Norman Kemp Smith, of
Edinburgh, coming to us later on?

Do not, Sweet, misunderstand any of this as a plea,
as even the most indirect pressure for your changing.
No: it has nothing to do with that. Only deep, strong,
most clear calls of conscience would make it right for
you to think of such a change. I only want, if God
will bless this old bungler, to remove a false impres-
sion I do not want, if ever such a condition of
conscience arose, for you to be stopped from following
it up by a bugbear, alas, of my own suscitation. You
will, Blessing, if you truly can say so, give me an
immense relief by telling me that you now understand.
I will, of course, gladly explain further, if there is
anything seriously obscure. I see that there was a
double self-seeking about me that evening. I was
thinking of my own case, instead of yours and I was
thinking of my own case unmanfully, softly, com-
plainingly. As a matter of fact I have found, and
I have at this moment, masses of deepest sympathy,
even of a purely personal kind, and this not simply
from dry scholars, but from darling Catholic saints
of God. If I got more, it would turn my old head.

And now, my Child, one good hug, and another
good hug, and a third good hug. And Christ bless
you, guard you, expand, pacify, and give you genial
joy, here, now, and for ever.

Loving old Fatherly One,

H.

M

130 Baron Von Hilge/'s

13 VICARAGE GATE

28 February, 1921.

Delighted by your letter and will now try and drop
all that distress on that point from my mind. Of course
you may copy parts or all of that L.S.S.R. paper of
mine. You have never mentioned receiving a proof of
a review of mine of a book by Heiler on Prayer. You
are meant to keep that. As to St. Francis de Sales, I will
send you some. Perhaps his chief work at once, the
Traite de L' Amour de Dieu. I somewhat fear your finding
him a bit cloying. I hope you will not, for his substance
is admirable. How many souls he has trained to
sanctity! But I want you still to read two short
Fenelons his Education des Filles and his chaplain's
account of his daily life at Cambrai the man lives
there before one. Also Shakespeare I too place
Macbeth highest for spiritual insight though Lear
I take to be one of the most awful evidences of power
of all three tragedies. But I like to keep the four
tragedies compared surely Othello stands almost as
high spiritually as Macbeth'?

F. v. H.

13 VICARAGE GATE, W.8

i March, 1921.

Still tied to bedroom, but was able this morning to
finish selection of Old Testament passages for my book.

Once and again was immensely struck and impressed
with the richness, reality, penetrating spirituality of the
Psalter, the Psalms at their best, a pity that frequent
use imperfect translation and the backward elements
(vindictiveness, earthly rewards nebulousness as to

Letters to a Niece 131

the other life) so largely obscure these very magnificent
things. Will have a lovely Easter book to suggest.

4 March. Still in bedroom the obstinate chest cold
and cough upon the whole better, but still far from
gone. Worst is, that not getting out leaves brain extra
wearyable.

Thanks for Fenelon returned. Glad you are keeping
the Lettres Spirituelles a bit. What utterly alive things
they are! Like all the finest results of immense training,
cost, perseverance, grace, they stand there as though
they could not be otherwise as if anyone, everyone
thought it all!

Have just accepted to speak at a large Summer
School at Swanwick on Sunday, 3 July. Will try to
get them to accept some quite definite point for my
discourse.

13 VICARAGE GATE, W.8

Child of my old Heart, n April, 1921.

Here is your book back. If you re-read your copy of
my (Notes) on Holy Communion you will find it
much more intelligible, I am sure. You had copied
carefully, but my poor text was rough!

Dare not write properly till after 2 May, as I ex-
plained on post card. But one or two post cards will,
perhaps, get written, and I can, of course, always
gladly read letters from you. Everything, everything at
once, sweetened in the love of God of Christ.

que rien ne t' epouvante,
que rien ne te trouble;
Tout passe;
Dieu seul.

S. TERESA.

132 Baron Von

What jolly good stuff those saints give one, don't
they?

Loving old Uncle-Father,

H.

13 VICARAGE GATE, KENSINGTON, W.8

Ascension Day, 5 May, 1921.

Here at last I am more free again, and the first
letter I write because I love to write it, is to my most
dear little old Thing though really "little," at least
physically! is not the right word.

It was only late on Thursday night, 3rd, that the
big strain came to an end, through the delivery of my
address on "Suffering in God." The thing was, as it
were, externally a success: twenty-six of us met
together a large number for our not large society.
And they were all, as ever, most kind and dear to
me personally. But I trust it is sincerely so one feels,
on such occasions, more cheered by agreement in the
convictions expressed, than by any amount of such
pleasant attentions. Some twelve of my listeners spoke
through my machine after and on the paper; and only
two agreed with my fundamental to me such a clear,
dear, and important point: that although, of course,
God is full of sympathy and care for us; and though
we cannot succeed vividly to represent His sympathy
otherwise than as a kind of suffering, we must not
press this to mean that suffering, what we experience
in our own little lives as suffering, is as such and
literally in God. God is overflowing Love, Joy, and
Delectation. I showed, I think, many and grave
reasons as warnings against importing, or admitting

Letters to a Niece 133

suffering in God. I gave a detailed instance of ruin
effected in a fine mind, and in all his outlook, in a
man who began with that one eccentricity real,
literal suffering in God.

My Sweet: in a few days I am beginning the third
and final writing of this thing; and when it is all
typed and ready to go, for printing, to America to
be out in September I shall want you to read it
carefully for me, telling me if it comes home to you
throughout as live and true, and if it is as clear as
I can make it. I hope to have it thus ready, say, in
three weeks from now.

And of course I shall greatly love seeing you here
next Wednesday, nth. As an exception, it happens
that on that day the morning say ten-thirty to
twelve-thirty would do quite well, so if afternoon
would have to be shorter as to your visit, come in
morning. If afternoon will really do as well, then
I prefer afternoon say four, or four-thirty, or five
for, I hope, an hour and a half.

13 VICARAGE GATE, KENSINGTON, W.8

Darling Child, 19 May, 1921.

I find I can scribble a bit this afternoon, so I will
write you a letter, Dear. You gave me no coming
address, so I will just send this to Friendly Green,
where you may still be. At least, they will forward
all right, I do not doubt.

As to the Parallel Psalter book, I had to wait,
because for months I was 100 and then 150 to the
bad at the bank; but these last weeks I have been, to

134 Baron Von

my pleased surprise, 150 to the good. So I could
well afford this book for you, and got it at once, with
such joy!

I well understand what you feel about religion,
suffering and caring. But please notice carefully, and
for a general principle of wise judgment, that religion,
on its human side, in so far as it is a human activity
is subject to excesses and defects, to diseases and aber-
rations more or less special to itself, but which no
more prove anything against religion at its best
religion as it is on God's side than do the corre-
sponding excesses and defects, deflections and diseases
of Art, of Science, of Politics, of Marriage, prove
aught against these kinds of life and of reality, taken
at their best and in their intendedness on God's side.
I possess a French medical psychologist's very in-
structive yet dangerously plausible, really anti-religious
book, Les Maladies du Sentiment Religieux. As a matter
of fact, for his mind (perhaps unbeknown to himself)
religion, the whole of religion, is these "maladies."
We live in times of such obvious transition, decline,
poverty of deep, creative conviction, of such excess of
analysis over synthesis that it is in the air all around
us to ask questions, to poke about, to wonder, to
drift, to use the microscope; where to become and
to be, to produce reality, to adore and to will, and to
see things in the large and upon the whole, and at
their best, is what we all require.

As to religion and caring for our dear ones, I enclose
for you to keep the glorious profession of faith and of
love of St. Bernard on occasion of the death of his half-
brother and fellow- Cistercian (= strict Benedictine)
monk Gerard. The entire sermon is most touching. But

Letters to a Niece 135

is not this bit vibratingly beautiful? I have translated
it as well as I could; but it has lost, alas, a good deal
in the process!

I shall not be sending you, Sweet, that "Suffering
and God" address, at least not typed, after all. I found
on reflection, and after getting some letters from
hearers of it, that it was little or no use to publish the
thing as it stands that it really requires, for such as
do not already hold its views, an entire new section,
a section i. which would draw out the right principles
and proper method for such an inquiry. You see, my
Sweet, young people always just go ahead on such
points, as though they were talking, say, of Sargent's
portraits or of Drinkwater's plays, or at least of things
which we can hold, overlook, comprehend. But as to
God, we can, indeed, be sure, very sure, of Him
He is implied in all our thinking, feeling, willing,
doing; it is the implicit faith in the reality and the
useful work of truth, of goodness, of life which will
never die out for long amongst mankind. And we can,
we do, gain vivid experience of Him, if only we will
die, die, day and night, to self. We can thus increas-
ingly apprehend Him can know really about Him,
the head, the source of all reality and of all sense of
reality. But we cannot encircle Him, map Him out,
exhaustively explain Him. We cannot really say, as
these objectors cheerfully argued: "If He feels joy,
He must also feel pain": we cannot, for we thus
assume that we are dealing with a fellow human
being; that by "feeling" in God we mean no other,
no more, than by "feeling" in man. Nor can we argue,
as another pressed upon me, that he would break his
heart, if his only son took to an impure life; how

136

Baron Von

much more then must God break His heart, if and
when any of us gravely sins. We cannot so argue,
because here again we do not encircle, penetrate God;
and because we must not press points in ways and de-
grees which would contradict certain other, and really
deeper, intimations and requirements of the religious
sense. Now the deepest intimation and requirement
we really have got though sadly weakened in many
of us by the fever and rush of life since about A.D. 1790
is Being (as distinct from Becoming), is Perfection
(as distinct from Attempting), is indeed Action, but
not Change. Of course change in ourselves, in the
sense of becoming better and better in all things;
but this this need of change in us, comes simply
from our imperfection. We are not God. Yet how we
need Him! And this, then, not as just a larger our-
selves, not as a larger Becoming, but as Being, as
Joy Pure and Undefiled.

Now this, with the St. Bernard which I will now copy
for you, must do for to-day, my Child.

13 VICARAGE GATE

30 May, 1921.

Am now, Child, in midst of proof correction of
my Essays, as well as (when these leave me a pause)
at work on the book. So I dare not write a long letter
only something to go with the accompanying MS.
of Suffering and God. I am rather ashamed to lend,
even you, this still not sufficiently clarified thing.
Show it to no one else. You may, I trust, learn from
it, even so. I have had further adhesions to its main
positions.

Letters to a Niece 137

I have been very happy over the thought of your
visit to Mrs. Rice, a real short holiday. So glad peace
is reigning within. How wise the Imitation is, in always
preparing the soul for its desolate times; for if once
we learn, and continue to learn better and better,
how to keep on steadily during those times and to
profit by them, why we have learnt the secret of
solid advance.

Mrs. L has written from America. Evidently

going on steadily and well. She will, I believe though,
grow richer in soul and outlook.

I will have to attend D. Farquhar's address before
our L.S.S.R. meeting on 7 June, about Indian Pan-
theism as soon as ever his reaches me. A great
scholar for the Indian side of the question but strangely
inferior as soon as ever he comes to treat of the
Christian positions. This, though he is a devoted
Christian missionary, with at least thirty years of
Christian religious thinking behind him. Why is this?
I am sure of the answer. Because as a Protestant
Nonconformist, he looks at all the Christian side from
far too individualistic, sectarian, single Bible-texts,
point of view. You cannot get these great questions
solved, or even only stated greatly except through
much history, institutions, Church appurtenances. No
doubt these things will not, alone, suffice; they can
even be taken in a way that stifles. Yet they are wanted.
A child may cut itself with the table-knife, yet such a
knife is necessary for cutting the bread.

Trust no headaches, Child.

Loving old,

Uncle.

138 Baron Von HUgel's

13 VICARAGE GATE, KENSINGTON, W.8

Child Mine, a I July, 1921.

I have now lots to answer, lots to tell. But first about
the books. I am sending you three books about Socrates
two are presents, one is a loan; and a fourth book as
a help an adviser with regard to sensitiveness.

1. I want you first to read John Burnet's analysis
of the evidence as to Socrates, and his estimate as to
the influences which played upon Socrates's mind,
and the way in which he sorted them out and deve-
loped them. You will find this in Burnet's edition of
Plato's Phtedo (which I lend you), pages ix-lvi. I want
you to study these pages twice through, most carefully.

2. Then take (in the volume I give you of Xeno-
phon's Anabasis and Memorabilia] the "Memorabilia of
Socrates, " pages 349-507. This, too, I want read through
at least twice (with the notes, as far as you can follow
these; and looking up all sites in your Classical Atlas).
Please keep alive everywhere to Socrates's irony; he
hardly ever opens his mouth without it colouring what
he says; take him literally and you mostly make him
say the very opposite he means. Try, too, to trace
the influence of the Sophists, of Anaxagoras, of the
Pythagoreans and Orphics, etc. : Burnet ought to have
helped you towards this. And finally contrast his
teachings and tone with the Christians' outlook.

3. Then take the Four Socratic Dialogues of Plato,
translated by Jowett with Preface by Edward Caird,
which I give you. First, a double reading of Caird's
Preface, pages v-xi. Then the Analysis of the "Etithy-
phro," pages 1-9. Then the "Euthyphro" itself, pages
1 0-36, twice. The same with the " Apology, " the " Crito "

Letters to a Niece 139

(Creito) and the Phedo. Note again in these four Dia-
logues, Socrates's irony, the sources of his ideas, and
their limits and peculiarities when compared with
Xenophon's account of them, and still more when
compared with the Christian outlook. (Of course
pre-existence is a myth, and there do not really occur
any memories from such a pre-existence.)

When you have done all this, I should like you to
re-read again Burnet's account, and to see how far
you yourself have found it true. (You will remember
that I utilised Burnet's elucidation of all that the
philosopher Socrates owed to the religious (Pythagorean
and Orphic), in my criticism of Gorrance, and his
turning from the Sun, definite religion, to the Moon,
philosophy.)

4. I give you Faber's Spiritual Conferences because,
although I do not believe him to be a truly classical
spiritual writer, several of these conferences will at
least can, I think help you much. I am thinking
especially of "Kindness," 1-53; "Wounded Feelings,"
260-74; "The Monotony of Piety," 314-32; and "All
Men have a Special Vocation," 375-96. Surely, Sweet,
there is much, much knowledge of our poor human
heart here. I feel that Faber's limitations are, at
bottom, three, (i.) He hardly ever leaves anything to
his hearers or readers to develop further by and for
themselves. He was cleverly called "the spiritual
Dickens" by a man who pointed out the same pecu-
liarity in Dickens, (ii.) He has got a touch indeed
more than a touch of vulgarity he can, at times,
speak as though he were a Salvation Army Hallelujah
lass. Arid (iii.) he never quite got beyond the anti-
Protestantism so common amongst our converts

140 Baron Von

devotion to the Blessed Virgin, loyalty towards the
Pope, and the like, were, because antipathetic to
Protestants, underlined by, revelled in by, Faber to
a degree which, at times, put them out of their
Catholic proportion, their Catholic perspective. He
would thus, instead of a continuator of the grand
old pre-Reformation Catholic piety of England,
become an imitation an affectation of Italian, of
Neapolitan piety. But you will find only little of
all this in this volume, I think. Faber sprang from an
originally French, Huguenot family; hence, in part,
I do not doubt, his love of point, paradox, hyperbole.

As to your news and questions, Dear.

There is, to my delight, once more your funda-
mental experience of, and call to Recollection the
Prayer of simple Quiet. This is, of course, a true, deep
grace of God; it is by being very faithful to it, by
feeding it, by dropping what weakens or drives it
away, that you will become happy and holy. How
beautifully simple! I quite understand the two stages
of it the stage of distractions and of having to drive
to strive to drive them away; and then the stage of
a living, somehow self-acting recollection with God,
His peace, power and presence, right in the midst of
this rose of spiritual fragrance.

I think you could pretty easily weaken, or delay,
this sense by too much dwelling (even from the best
of motives) upon the criticisms of yourself, such as
you mention. I do not believe in getting peace from
seeking (and even finding) that the criticism was not
deserved. And indeed even if it was entirely not
deserved, our minding criticism so very much its
hurting us so much: this is surely a weakness, a

Letters to a Niece 141

faulty condition, at least of our nerves. If and when
we become genuinely deeply humble, we shall feel
that we very certainly are full of faults, either those
particular faults, or other faults it will be too much
of a most certain fact to our minds, for any possible,
or even obvious mistake as to the fault the kind of
fault to surprise or vex us out of our peace. Still, of
course, even then then especially we would quietly
and shortly look as to whether we can find the fault
in us, and if we found it would ask Christ Our Lord
to help us weed it out or drop it. Yet always would
I expect to find you to grow more by feeding the
quiet within you than by direct self-examinings or
self-fightings. These two latter things also to exist in
your life but much less, less centrally than the feed-
ing of the quiet and the loving of God, Christ, and
others in it.

As to Confession, I have a certain complication about
it in my mind, which, I expect, is not very common
even amongst my own people. You see, with the
Sacraments, as, indeed, with all other points of religion,
I so love to trace the great lines of their development,
and to find out, and to cling to, whatever may be of
the essence of the Catholic doctrine and practice.
Applying this to Confession I find (as you can read
in full in my Mystical Element} that the essential, primi-
tive, unchangeable part is obligatory Confession in case
of Grave Sin. The Protestant Reformers abolished the
Obligation in any and every instance. And now High
Churchmen have come to recommend fairly frequent
Confession, in imitation of our (R.C.) late mediaeval,
and still more, our modern habit. Now I do not doubt
that fairly frequent Confession can help on souls, yet

142 Baron Von Huge/'s

I love to keep quite clear in my own mind an element
of Obligation which the Protestant Reformers unhappily
lost abolished; and an element of Conditionally
Freedom with regard to the late mediaeval and
modern Frequent Confession, which even my High
Anglican friends are lacking in. I want, in this point
also, a wise, firm circumspection. But to take the
practice of Confession as simply in all circumstances
not obligatory as always what we call "Confession
of Devotion," I quite see that also taken this way,
the soul can get real help and growth in self-know-
ledge, humility, etc., from it. Since our, late centuries,
discipline, in the matter is just disciplinary i.e. since
Rome herself could relax it any way up to, excluding,
Confessions for Grave Sin, it is certainly not for me
to press you to very frequent Confessions of Devotion.
I myself go every fortnight or every three weeks
but this, simply because of the extant discipline of the
Church, and because I feel I ought not to exempt
myself from it. I expect that every six months would
be quite frequent enough for yourself, to get all the
good, in your particular life and particular attrait,
that the practice would be likely to give you. Of
course, you would have to learn to do so with a special
kind of freedom and a special kind of strictness accord-
ing to the special demands of God upon your soul.
Cela varie, Huvelin would have said, entre dme et dme.

I have, these last days, been seeing a former fellow-
student of Gertrude's, for many years an Agnostic,
then a fervent High Anglican; who, now thirty-eight,
is inclining to take herself back, to look out for No. i,
to grumble and to turn sour. Am doing what I can
for her: pray for her. Have explained how she requires

Letters to a Niece 143

a second conversion this time against the dust and
drear when the physical enthusiasm dwindles.

The American, Miss Branham, who went to try her
call, with those strict, field-working Benedictinesses,
has just written to say she is very happy as a hard-
worked Postulant; I really think she will succeed: a
fine instance of the genuineness of such calls.

I do wish those headaches would go. Will tell
Thekla what you say for her when I see her.

J3 VICARAGE GATE, W.8

My darling Gwen-Child, 27 July, 1921.

Let me now try first to explain about Confession.
You see, the very earliest Christian position as to
grave (=" Mortal") sin was that a man or woman,
one baptised as an adult (and thereby purified from
his or her sins), did not again fall into such grave
sins. Hence the question as to what he or she should
do, in case they did, in fact, relapse, did not then arise.

(You can find traces of these conditions and con-
victions in Saint John's Epistles, and other nooks and
corners of the New Testament.) But I need not tell
you that only a little time was, in most regions of the
nascent Church, necessary for this first intense martyr
fervour to abate, and for the question concerned to
become very much alive and fully practical. If you
look in Tertullian (perhaps the selection you possess
would suffice, but anyhow in others of his writings he
is quite plain), you will find "the second plank after
shipwreck" the "first plank" being baptism. What is

the second plank"? "The second plank" is Christian

(C

144 Baron Von Hugel's

Penance or Penitence. Of what does this consist? It
consists of three parts, each of which in case of grave
(= mortal) sin, is necessary for the Divine Forgiveness:
contrition, confession, and satisfaction. The meaning
of "contrition" is, of course, quite clear; then, as
now, it means a definite sorrow for having committed
those sins, a sorrow from the motive of the love of
God, and a deliberate, firm resolution of amendment!
The meaning of "satisfaction," too, remains sub-
stantially the same the restoration, as far as possible,
of whatever we may have unjustly taken away
conjugal fidelity, or health, or fortune, etc. but the
"confession" then meant, for several centuries, a
Public confession, in the Christian Church Assembly,
before, and into the hands of, the Bishop. The bishop
it was who, during the earlier time, only after a con-
siderable space filled with works and proofs of peni-
tence, solemnly, again in the Christian Church
Assembly, reconciled the sinner with God absolved
him from his sins, in the name and by the power of
Christ.

Now in those early centuries there was no habit of
confession for venial sins. I suppose that now and then
such a thing as private confession for venial sins
happened. But if it did, it must have been rarely,
since I do not know of any documents attesting such
confessions. In any case, it is entirely clear that such
confessions were not considered obligatory were not
believed to be essential to reconciliation with God.
The proof of this is that even the strictest Roman
Catholic theologians to this hour teach that we cannot
press strict obligation to beyond grave (= mortal)
sins; that the confession of venial sins (such as has

Letters to a Niece 145

become general in the Roman Catholic Church
since, say, A.D. 1350 or a little earlier) can only be
pressed on the ground of its being conceited not to
follow the prevalent discipline of the Church, and on
the ground of the spiritual utility, etc. In strictness,
even with us Roman Catholics, a soul which has
committed no grave sin is not conscious of an
unconfessed grave sin would not be obliged to more
than to present itself, once a year, at Eastertide, to
the priest, to tell him it had no grave sin to confess,
and to ask his blessing (even this only because of
certain Decrees of Councils in about 1260 and 1560).

Now confessions for venial sin we call confessions
of Devotion confessions for mortal sin we call con-
fessions of Obligation. My feeling I somehow must go
to confession (for venial sin) does not make such
confession into a confession of obligation; nor con-
trariwise, does my not feeling any obligation to
confess unconfessed mortal sin make such confession
into a confession of devotion. What the Church
thinks, not what you or I feel or think, is here decisive
and discriminative.

Now for myself, upon the whole, I regret, I will not
say all confessions of devotion; I believe, on the
contrary, that they have helped to train and sanctify
many a soul. Also, I am glad that Anglicans should
practise them in moderation and wisely. But what
I mind much more is the breach at the Reformation,
by the Protestant reformers, even in England the
breach, not in the then prevalent practice of confes-
sions of devotion, but in the immemorial doctrine and
conviction of confessions of obligation. It was then that
the conviction was abandoned that a Christian (if he

N

146 Ear on Von Hugel's

have the physical opportunity of finding a priest)
cannot attain forgiveness for mortal sin, without
confession, as one of the three essential conditions of
Christian Penitence. True, the fathers of Anglicanism
managed, most wisely, to retain the doctrine and
practice of confession, for all souls which spontaneously
wanted it, which felt it would help them. And again
I do not doubt that many a High Churchman has in
his heart of hearts continued the old pre-Reformation,
Catholic conviction of the necessity, the obligation, of
confession in case of grave sins. Yet, alas, this is not the
official position he is not free to press it confession
remains, officially, even for grave sin amongst Angli-
cans less obligatory than, amongst Roman Catholics,
is confession for venial sin (for here, as explained, there
is the fear of going against the present discipline of
the Church, etc.).

So you can now understand, I hope, my Child, what
I meant in this whole matter. It seems to me that, for
yourself, you will do well by using confessions of
devotion in moderation and with wisdom and peace-
fulness; and that (if you can do so without strain and
mental contortion) it will be well if you can add to
this practice the conviction that, if you had grave
sin on your conscience, you would then be bound to
confess. You see, this, as regards your own practice
of confession, introduces no complication of any kind.
It only somewhat complicates your Anglican outlook.
And, Blessing, the cry of my old heart is to be to
become a not all unworthy follower of Him who
broke not the bruised reed and quenched not the
burning flax! so there, enough about that I

My holiday begins certainly on n August, possibly

Letters to a Niece 147

on 8 August (i.e. if they have me at Farnham Castle
from 8 August to u August when I join Eva and
Pucky at Thursley). I have written to the bishop
proposing, as an alternative, to come to them after
Thursley, i.e. from Friday, 9 September, to Monday,
12 September.

Am trying hard to get you a good second-hand copy
of Jowett's Plato translation complete. It is in that that
I intend to march you through certain dialogues for
Plato himself, when you have done the Socrates reading.

Loving Uncle,

jj
About Harry's book another time!

13 VICARAGE GATE, W.8

My darling Gwen, 29 July, 1921.

Thanks much for letter.

i. About confession, then, we have got all clear.
I am feeling that it will be a good thing for you to
go to the amount you propose, also for the reason that
it still further forms you along the lines of the moderate,
Church mystical, the mixed type by far the safer and
richer. That very balanced, wide-seeing American
psychologist of religion, whom I saw in his room
some days back, is full of the all-importance of the
difference between Pure or Sheer or Exaggerated
Mysticism (which is akin to Pantheism or some kinds
of Spiritualism) and Mixed or Moderate Mysticism,
which finds its completion, articulation and safety in
history and institutions. The latter Mysticism both
gives to, and gets from, history and institutions much,
very much.

148 Baron Von Hu gel's

2. About the Sadhu: I enclose the memorandum
I drew up, at the request of Canon Streeter and.
Mr. Appasamy, towards the construction and orien-
tation of their book on the Sadhu. I was much struck
with how far more rich and probing the outlook was
of the young Indian layman, the son of Indian con-
verts to Christianity, than the Englishman, a cleric
a canon of an historic Christian church, and de-
scended from a long Christian ancestry a man
middle-aged, too. It was Appasamy who how often
was and is puzzled by the Sadhu's insistence upon
direct inspiration that he does nothing except under
such. "But please, Baron, is this necessary? Cannot,
and does not God speak to us also through various
means which spring from Him?" The canon a man
whom I like, he is so clean and so serious, and so
pacific and sweet in discussion would never ask
such a question; indeed I doubt not that his chief
interest in the Sadhu springs from this Indian, and,
in some ways, supremely individualist, attitude. I say
"in some ways," for, after all, his mind and words
are most fortunately for all saturated with what he
finds in the New Testament.

I find the Sadhu to be a fine, firm character a
devoted will, but to have curiously little mind. I think
if he had more mind (and remained as finely un-
fanatical as he now is) he could not think, say, the
following strangely unperceptive thoughts. For one
thing, he told me himself, upon my questioning him
very carefully on the point that, during the thirteen
years since he has been a Christian, he has never, not
even for some moments, experienced spiritual dryness,
spiritual desolation. I asked my close friend, Professor

Letters to a Niece 149

N. Kemp Smith, the philosopher, a religious mind,
what he thought of this, and without hesitation, he
judged that the Sadhu either did not really know
himself, or did not know what "spiritual desolation"
means, or did not understand either. Then, as to the
continual Direct Inspiration, I was lent one of his
addresses, typed, in which he specially insisted upon
this point; yet much the most alive thing in the whole
address was the exclamation: "He made us for Him-
self, and restless is our heart until it rests in Him,"
which very certainly comes from St. Augustine's
Confessions, Book I. chapter i. section i.

3. As to Suggestion and Auto-Suggestion and
Religion, or at least Mystical Religion, you can find
in my Mystical Element certain positions, taken over
from M. Boutroux, which I still believe to be sound.
Also please read, and lend if and where this may be
wise, Father Walker on "The Psychology of the
Spiritual Exercises," in the Hibbert Journal for last
April, which I also send (pages 40113 there).

(I also enclose the Hibbert Journal for this July,
because of the symposium in it on "Morals and
Religion." I think you have not yet seen my little
paper there, pages 60510. Professor Chevalier, pages
61015, I hke, though it is perhaps too, as it were,
mathematically clear. But the other three papers are
very unsatisfying, I think.)

4. Dearie, I have plenty of money just now, so want
to tip you a five pounds for any little outing or what
not. Here it is bless you! I heard from the bishop
yesterday, I am to come to them from 8 August to
ii August.

After all I had better send the two Hibberts in a

150 Baron Von HugeFs

separate parcel. You see, Dear, the all-important
points as to Suggestion, Auto-Suggestion, Mono-Ideism,
etc. are to remember (i.) that all such things, where
real and fruitful, are means, methods, connections,
etc. instrumental; and (ii.) that they can be thus
real and fruitful because there exist realities above
all The Reality distinct from them and us. Religion,
as such, makes straight for these latter things; Psy-
chology, etc. may, and does, potter over those other,
lesser things.

13 VICARAGE GATE

My Gwen-Child, 8 August, 1921.

Before starting to-day for my holiday, I write down
this scheme of the study of this Jowett's Plato for you.
It will go with the volumes your own copy as soon
as such copy is found by my booksellers.

I divide up Plato into five groups and periods and
of these I want you to take the greatest dialogues in
four of these groups and periods. (One of the groups is
too hard for any but specialists.)

I. Socratic Dialogues. Euihyphro Apology. Crito.
Phcsdo. You have already done these.

II. Educational Dialogues.

1. Protagoras.

2. Gorgias.

3. Phtsdrus.

4. Meno.

5. Symposium.

Omit the Critical Dialogues.

Letters to a Niece 151

Read Comprehensive Dialogues Phado really be-
longs here. The Republic. Work of old age. The Laws.

I should like you always to study Jowett's Introduc-
tion carefully then the Dialogues twice; and then the
Introduction a last time.

Please specially watch, in the Phtsdrus, the Meno, the
Symposium and the Republic, points taken over later by
the Christian thinkers especially St. Augustine.

I incline to recommend your beginning with the
Socratic Dialogues again, and reading them here for
the purpose, not of Socrates but of Plato and reading
these so as to keep the Pheedo in its place according to
the date of composition.

THE RED LION INN, THURSLEY, NEAR GODALMING,

SURREY

My darling Gwen-Child, 23 August, 1921.

At last I am scribbling to you again, with plenty to
say, but still in a drifting, lazy, tired holiday mood,
hence shrinking away from much detail or precision.
Let me number my subjects.

i. Before leaving home, I wrote you a letter of
instructions as to the exact selection, order, method,
etc., with which I should like you to read Plato; and
this letter I left with my lady bookseller, to put into
the parcel of Jowett's Plato four volumes as soon
as they had received a well-preserved and not over-
dear second-hand copy (the book has been out of
print a long while now). You will see that I assume
you to have carefully studied the Socratic Dialogues

1 52 Baron Von HUgel's

(including the Phtedo, which really belongs to a later
period of writing); that I group for you the other
dialogues which I want you to study into four groups;
and that I invite you to skip for the present at least
the six very difficult and technical dialogues of the
critical group. Even so, you have a large and splendidly
rich field before you, and we will talk over together,
and read certain great passages together, carefully,
I hope and believe. I want you to get to think and
feel Platonically on quite a number of points.

2. I left home on Monday, 8th, and stayed at
Farnham Castle till after tea on the nth. How full
up, and what a va et vient it was, and, apparently,
always is there! The widow of an Episcopalian Bishop
of Glasgow and her daughter; another golden-haired
young lady, and Walter Frere, an old friend of
mine, head of the Community of the Resurrection
at Mirfield, Yorks, there the ladies till Wednesday
morning, Frere till Thursday morning. Then on
Wednesday, from eleven till six, some sixteen clerics,
suffragan bishops, canons, rectors, etc., for a con-
ference on Faith Healing. Then by tea-time on
Wednesday the Fords the parents and the seven
children. And on the Thursday by lunch-time, the
Episcopalian Bishop of New York and two other
gentlemen for the night. Miss Winnie Talbot and
the secretary, Miss Wilcox, were there all the time. . . .

4. The bishop asked me to say a few words to those
assembled Faith-Healing clerics, with two of whom
I got some pleasant talk before and later on. I attempted
three points. That I could not feel the force of the
appeal to St. Paul's account of the faith-healers in the
Church of Corinth, since there we have the uprush of

Letters to a Niece 153

a mass offerees and influences, strong with the strength
of an immense new religion forces and influences in
no wise directly produced, or even intended, by
St. Paul, but simply regulated, graduated by him,
seeing that they existed in chaotic force all around
him. He had not looked to see what the world then
required, nor had lent an ear to what it asked for,
and had then assumed the presence of these powers
amongst his Christians. No: the powers were there,
seethingly, obtrusively; because they were there, he
organised and utilised them. Did my hearers feel
they possessed such powers? Were these their powers
so strong as to demand regulation, graduation? If
not, was it not unreal (surely, a great weakness in
religion!) to organise, even to discuss, as though the
demand for such things, or even the desirableness of
such things, were equal to their supply, to their
obtrusive presence? That this my point was not
controversially meant that I should feel the same
about my own people: I did not see indications of
their possessing such individual faith-healing powers,
and did not see how, unless and until they possessed
them, it was real to discuss their utilisation. My
second point was that I felt Extreme Unction, prac-
tised as it was amongst ourselves as a sacrament
officially and not as an individual gift a rite so
ancient as to be clearly taught in the New Testament,
in the Epistle of St. James to stand on quite a different
plane. That I should love to see them work for the new
recognition of this. Let them have the insight and the
courage to part company with Luther's rejection of
that Epistle, and to work for the acceptation of that
touchingly beautiful, most helpful rite the anointing

154 Ear on Von Hugel's

of the dangerously sick. And my third point was to
beware, in either case, of action parallel with that of
the physician, or in supplantation of him. We are
Christians, not Christian Scientists. The action of the
physician should move upwards, from the body, his
chief concern, to the mind and with God in the back-
ground. The action of the priest should move down-
wards from God as his central concern, to the human
soul and the body at last. That is, let them strive to
become, not faith-healers but saints. How I have
learnt to see that even the tenderness, the social
interest and sympathy of Christ, was so entrancing and
so operative because proceeding from, and throughout
conjoined with, a lofty sanctity, an awful holiness
the bending of loftiness, the mercy of purity: the two
not any one of these things the two together
with the Holiness, the closest union of God as the
starting and returning point of the whole Anecdote:
how the Good Shepherd nuns attain to successes with
fallen women, greater than any other body, whether
Roman Catholic or not.

5. I should love to write on, but must now go to
Puck who has to be out of this inn. Am here till
9 September; then home. Poor Hillie has had a
sudden violent attack of influenza been very weak,
but is mending now. Was moved to Vicarage Gate.

Loving Uncle-Father,

H.

7 October, 1921.

You bring up, my Gwen-Child, a point which
I suppose you really feel an objection. Even if you

Letters to a Niece 155

do not feel it so, I think it well worth while to clear
out this corner of your mind, so as to make quite sure
that you correctly seize the truly great doctrine of
Purgatory. I want, then, to make sure that you
clearly understand that, according to that doctrine,
sufFering (rightly accepted, suffering) is indeed usually
necessary for, is inherent in, the purification from
sin, evil habits, etc. But it makes no substantial dis-
tinction between such purification as taking place
already here or taking place in the Beyond. In all our
Retreats we are taught that it will have been our
own fault, if the sufferings of our life here have not
sufficed to purify us from our sins and evil habits.
Of course, even very great sufferings would not,
simply of themselves, purify us from even small evil
habits. It is only suffering meekly accepted, willed, trans-
figured by love of God, of Christ it is only such that will
purify or cure anything. This is so true that, where the
love is perfect, this love alone, without any suffering not
directly prompted by itself, completely blots out the
evil dispositions. Such a soul, even if previously a
great sinner, goes straight to Heaven upon its death.
Yet in all cases, Purgatory applies indifferently to
sufferings rightly borne in this life and the same simi-
larly borne in that life. There is simply no such thing
as a Purgatory here followed, as though it had not
been, by a Purgatory hereafter. On the contrary,
every pang God allows to reach us here, and which we
manage to bear a little well, does a work not to be
repeated. We become thus fitter and fitter for complete
union with Christ and God from the very minute of
our death.
I have written "a little well" on purpose. For to

156 Baron Von Huge/'s

suffer well is far more difficult than to act well (although
the ordinary talk is that we have just "to grin and bear"
suffering we can do nothing to it or with it!!!). Holy
suffering is the very crown of holy action. And God is
no pedant: He can and does look to the substance of
our suffering, and knows how to penetrate beyond our
surface restlessness or murmurs. Indeed part of the
grand work suffering effects in the soul doubtless
springs from the way in which, when acute, it almost
invariably humbles us: we can much less easily cut a
fine figure in our own eyes over our sufferings, than we
can over our actions when in peace and plenty.

You understand all the above completely, I trust?
We will both do what gently, peaceably we can to
have all our Purgatory every drop of it here; and
then, and then, Heaven, the closest union, unfailing,
with Pure Joy, with All Purity, with Christ, with God.

Loving old Uncle,
H.

13 VICARAGE GATE, W.8

My darling Gwen-Child, 12-14 November, 1921.

Here I am, at last again scribbling to you! I do not
know whether you have gone back to the old rectory;
but I will address this there, unless I hear, before
putting this up, that you are at some other given
address.

I have much to say, as to your points, and a good
many things about my own experience.

1. ...

2. I am delighted you have now read Plato's Phado

Letters to a Niece 157

four times. How fine, if gradually, you get to know all
the Dialogues (except those six or seven very technical
ones) as well as this one! Margaret Roper, Sir Thomas
More's daughter, doted upon Plato in the Greek
original; I shall be glad indeed if my own Niece-
daughter comes to know Plato, almost as well, in
the English translation.

3. ...

4. I had three most happy, I hope useful, days at
Beaconsfield. There were nine of us in all. Mr. W. B.
Trevelyan, the head of the house a second cousin of
G. M. Trevelyan (who wrote on Wycliffe and Gari-
baldi); and his young sub-warden both very High
Anglican clerics; then Mr. Hockley, Rector of Liverpool,
a tall, black-haired, manly creature; also Mr. Carey,
second-in-command of the Gowley Fathers a straight,
simple man; a bishop returned, after eighteen years'
work in Bloemfontein (South Africa), a year ago
a fatherly, genial man; a Mr. Platts, Vicar of
St. Michael's, a High Ritual church close to Thekla's
convent zealous, straight; and finally a charming
layman, Mr. Arthur Smallwood, Governor of Green-
wich Hospital, about forty years old, with whom I
got some very private talk. No; there was one man
more: Father Denys, one of the three Anglican
Benedictines who did not go over to Rome when,
some fifteen years ago, the other twelve or so of the
community of Galdy did so. I like this Father Denys
much. I certainly think the position of a Benedictine
not accepting the jurisdiction of the Pope a very
strange one. But if "Charity covereth a multitude of
sins," good faith is compatible with, and expresses
itself in a multitude of strangely illogical positions.

158 Baron Von HugePs

And deliberate self-renunciation is everywhere dear
and darling. And then this Father Denys is evidently
a man of much spiritual shrewdness and extraordinarily
wide reading.

They certainly gave me lots to do. Half an hour's
speech at the preliminary meeting as to the precise
order and spirit of our conference; an address of one
hour; and answers to questions on it, for another
hour, on the Wednesday all as to facts about God,
specially useful to know in prayer; on Thursday,
address of an hour, and answers for an hour both
as regards the facts about the soul, most useful to know
in prayer. And besides, I got some private talks
with Mr. Platts, Father Denys and Mr. Smallwood
(as already said).

My chief general impressions were, I think, three,
(i.) What clean, good, straight, humble, earnest men!
My Gwen, you can add them, I am sure, all eight,
to the list of thoroughly clean men I tried to make
out for you the other day. (ii.) How greatly, even in
a sense excessively, they were under the spell of Rome
the mighty Mother. I felt it in their attitude towards
myself, which was very certainly not only, not even
chiefly, because of my individual personality, but
because I was a Roman Catholic, trained in, and who
could tell them about, that Mother Church. When
I said just now, "excessive," I mean that I found
them with little or no discrimination between what,
with us, is the substance and unchangeable, and what
is, again with us, the accident as the changing, or at
least changeable, discipline of the Church.

And (iii.) that final question showed, I thought,
that they attributed too much power to training, for

Letters to a Niece 159

they asked whether the spirit and life of an Abbe
Huvelin should not be taught and trained into such
Anglicans as were prepared for the clerical life, and
especially those who were to have the care of souls.
I answered that certainly it would be well, more and
more to improve such preparation; but that I was
confident such men as Huvelin would always be rare,
anywhere and at all times. That he himself, e.g. had
derived only a fragment of what he was and became,
from his technical, seminary training; that I thought
it would be well to teach the average Church student
that there were there existed deep, rare souls, both
amongst the laity and amongst the clerics, and to
encourage such student to refer such rare lay-folk to
the one or two deeply spiritual clerics he might be
taught to know about. That if Anglicans managed to
have, say, two such deeply spiritual clerics in each
diocese, they should be esteemed richly favoured. That
only great graces, many natural gifts, much suffering,
and devoted heroism all this or much of all this
combined would ever produce an Abbe Huvelin or
a Cure d'Ars.

5. Have had a bad night, so must stop this my second
go at this letter. May all be going well, or at least
better with you, Child.

Loving old Father-Uncle,

TT

Poor Muriel! But how brave she is being.

FROM LETTER OF 1 9 NOVEMBER, 1 92 1

2. As to Socrates (= Plato) in the (Protagoras), you
must not apologise for your dissatisfaction on those

160 Baron Von HugeTs

two points; for you are right, deeply right, about them.
Indeed there is also a third point, about which Socrates
(= Plato) here is equally mistaken or undiscriminative.
Let me write the three points out clearly.

(i.) Courage= knowledge; indeed virtue of any kind
= knowledge. This is certainly false, for the reasons
you give. But you will have noticed that Socrates fully
confesses that mankind at large does not take this
view. Well mankind at large was and is, on this
point, closer to the facts, than Socrates or Plato. But,
besides men generally, there were also ancient Graeco-
Roman thinkers and poets who felt and who taught
the opposite Ovid wrote:

Video meliora proboquc;
Dctcriora scquor?

I see the better and I approve it; and (yet) I follow
the worse. Yet it is Christianity, in the completion of
the Hebrew prophetic religion, which, as against the
Graeco-Roman world generally, has established the
full facts has made me see and feel most vividly the
difference between knowledge and virtue, between a
clear head and a clean heart. On this point Kant is
deeply Christian, when he insists upon the good will
as supremely precious, and when, in his doctrine of
Radical Evil, he holds that men can and do deliberately
prefer evil to good.

(ii.) Socrates (= Plato) lumps, in his doctrine of
opposites, two very different things hopelessly together.
There is (a) the contrary, the different say, blue and
yellow, compared with red, among colours; or notes
A, C, compared with D, among sounds. Here, two
things, say two virtues, though distinct and different

Letters to a Niece 161

from each other, can yet, perfectly well, co-exist
alongside of, or in union with, or fusion each with
the other.

And there is (b) the contradictory, where one thing is
the direct negation of the other; so with light, and
absence of all light, etc. Here no one thing can, in
any one and the same respect, contain, or be composed
of, such contradictories. Thus, among the virtues, a
man cannot, in precisely the same respect, be both
courageous and cowardly.

(iii.) Socrates (= Plato) insists here on the good as
just simply the pleasant; nor will he allow any action
to be measured as to the morality except according
as, at least eventually, it issues in pleasure or at least
a surplusage of pleasure. Now here Socrates (= Plato)
has not arrived at the profoundly important distinc-
tion between pleasure and beatitude (joy). He as yet
does not see that evil doing, in certainly the greater
number of cases, occurs simply because it is connected
with some immediate pleasure; whereas, doing right
is very frequently connected with the sacrifice of some
immediate pleasure or the facing of some immediate
pain yet the yielding to sheer pleasure is the sure
road to losing all beatitude, to losing even the sense of
what it means. Whereas the resisting of sheer pleasure,
according as right reason and duty may demand, is
the sure road to joy. I take it that Socrates (= Plato)
not seeing this (iii.) is the chief cause why he holds
his (i). For if once we vividly perceive that virtue
consists essentially in holding out against sheer pleasure
for solid joy, and that evil doing consists essentially in
yielding to sheer pleasure and thus losing solid joy;
o

1 62 Baron Von Hugel's

there is no need, there is no room, for knowledge,
still less for the identity of knowledge with virtue. Yet
note, Child, how these three errors are not errors pure
and simple; but that they are stages on the way to
precious truths. For: as to (i), it is true that there
exists much material (== non-formal) evil doing; that
men do what in itself is evil, often out of sheer ignorance
that it is evil. And with his searching about for a
knowledge as somehow close to virtue, Socrates
(= Plato) is working his way towards a system of
objective ethics what, especially nowadays, we want
again very badly. As to (2), it is true that the several
virtues have ultimately to be conceded as expressions,
dispositions, effects, etc., of one and the same soul.
Hence that, however different they may look, they
must not be conceived as utterly unlike each other.
And as to (3), the end, the final measure, of virtue is
indeed a state of soul the very opposite of unhappiness,
constraint, disgust. Socrates (= Plato) is here after
the supreme good, the utter joy, which, so far, he
understates horribly by the petty term of pleasure.

So glad of your post card too, and that you have
got to the Gorgias. You see that list I gave you will,
if followed out, give you Plato as he grows, as he corrects
himself. You will end by taking the mature Plato and
correcting the immature Plato by the mature Plato,
only that, no doubt, certain characteristically Hellenic
weaknesses remain, more or less, to the end. E.g. of
the above three points, No. (i) remains, in parts, to
the very end; but not so No. (2) nor No. (3).

Loving old,

Uncle-Father.

Letters to a Niece 163

13 VICARAGE GATE, W.8

My darling Gwen-Child, 9 December, 1921.

I have indeed been silent a long time with, now,
three dear and interesting letters of yours to answer.
The reasons of this have been two. I have been a good
deal tried by that arterial pressure at night; and as
the doctor had told me that the less exertion there was
in my day, the less I should suffer from it at night,
I determined to try what cutting down everything at
all avoidable would do. I am certainly now free from
that pressure, or, at least, from those effects though,
I suspect, only for a little spell. Yet I am deeply
thankful for it, since it means capacity for my com-
position work. My second reason was that I was
trying to get you the Cure d'Ars, and that stupid postal
losses of the first order have delayed my receiving
the books till to-day. I now send you, as presents, the
Life of the Cure, two volumes, and his Spirit, in one
little volume. (The Esprit repeats in part the sayings
registered in the Vie; but adds many fresh sayings.)
I wanted to send you these volumes ready bound, but
received them thus; and I think it better not first to
get them bound, as you would then not have the
books till after Christmas. I have cut the books open
for you, as I believe myself to be expert at this. I trust
and believe that the Cure's spirit will sink into your
heart, and help you greatly on to geniality, humility,
peace and happiness in God and for Him.

As to the young ex-curate, now one of our people;
how difficult, indeed how impossible, it is to judge

164 Baron Von Hugel's

whether such extreme renunciation is quite sound in
and for that particular soul, and will help it on to
deep but quite balanced self-renunciation (as in Abbe
Huvelin, the Cure d'Ars, etc.), or whether it is going
to lead to dangerous reactions, etc. The Christian
life, at its deepest and highest, is certainly not mere,
not sheer, common sense. And yet in the long run
some common sense has got to get into it, unless it
is to come to grief something like with visions and
the excellent advice Edward Talbot gave you con-
cerning them. There, too, one has just simply to wait,
and, meanwhile, not to treat such things as central
or as the measure of our advance or closeness to God.
As to whether converts to Rome are proselytisers.
I think at first, as a rule, they are. Surely this is not
difficult to understand. Such souls have generally
come, with considerable sacrifices, and, at the time,
with much spiritual light and fervour, to see and
feel sure of various facts which they before saw
fitfully or hardly at all. They very easily all but
inevitably forget or overlook the not inconsiderable
lights or helps they had before; and they have not
yet been long enough in the old Church to have
experienced its human poornesses nor to have them-
selves, within that Church, passed through desolation
and reaction. My brother told me of an interesting
conversation he had with our Bishop Brownlow, after
the latter had been one of our priests and then a
bishop some forty-eight years since he had been an
Anglican High Church curate. My brother told him
how he sometimes felt himself to be possibly quite
wrong in not being more active and enterprising in
trying to gain individual Protestants to the Church.

Letters to a Niece 165

That, as a matter of fact, he did nothing direct in this
way he never took the first step. The bishop answered
that, after the first few years of his Roman Catholic
life, when his zeal was restless and, he had now long
thought, indiscreet, he also had never pressed anyone;
had never taken the first step with anyone; that he
had now seen for many a long year how easy it is to
disturb souls from out of what contains much truth
and which they can and do assimilate to their spiritual
profit, and to push and strain them up to something
to which they are not really called and of which they
do not know what to make. That his conscience did
not upbraid him in this matter for the many later
years of his priestly and episcopal life; and that as to
those first years he hoped that he had not been as
unwise as he might have been.

Also, an experienced old priest (himself an early
convert to the Roman Catholic Church) once told
me that he had long found it a bad sign when converts
were not at least inclined to be active proselytisers.
That with born Roman Catholics it was different: these
could be thoroughly zealous in their religion, and yet
not be thus active, or inclined to be thus active.

As to myself, I find myself inclined to be very zealous
to help souls to make the most of what they already
have; and, if they come to think of moving, to test
them to the uttermost. And again, to do all I can
to make the old Church as inhabitable intellectually as
ever I can not because the intellect is the most
important thing in religion it is not; but because the
old Church already possesses in full the knowledge and
the aids to spirituality, whilst, for various reasons which
would fill a volume, it is much less strong as regards

1 66 Baron Von

the needs, rights and duties of the mental life. This
my second zeal includes the ardent wish and hope of
serving sore and sulky, fallen-off or falling-off Roman
Catholics to heal their wounds and bring them back.
One fallen-away Roman Catholic gives me more pain
than a hundred accessions to the Church give me joy.
For it is the sticking it which really matters in these
things and which is difficult.

As to Mother Julian, where on earth has my Gwen-
child acquired the notion that she was an Anglican!
An Anglican in A.D. 1360? My Gwen, we must do
some Church history later on! Of course she accepted
the Pope as she accepted Christ and as she accepted
God; although there was then no occasion to put
this forward.

What you say about prayer, Sweet, is all very true,
very solid. I know well what you mean. But though
we will most rightly shrink from saying that this or
that in it is God: yet it is God, His Reality, His Distinct-
ness from yet great Closeness to us, it is this grand
Over-againstness which through, and in, and on occa-
sion of what you describe we experience in our little
degree. What comes last in our analysis of such states,
is first in real existence. I enclose for you a little article
which (as all except my big book) was spontaneously
asked of me, title included. Do not, Dear, dwell much
upon or worry about the Pope. It is not for that that
I send it to you. Nor do I want you to lend it for that
to others who might be pressed or worried by it. I send
it because of the contrata bit; and because I am utterly
sure that this is the direct antidote to the all but
universal Pantheism of our times. Before people worry
about the Church or even about Christ, they must be

Letters to a Niece 167

helped to get God their notions as to God sound
and strong.

I also include a fine letter of Mrs. Clement Webb,
because you will admire what she says about suffering,
and because of the charming bit about Richard and
yourself. I do not require it back.

As to the Sadhu, I feel with you that we ought never
to forget his non-Europeanness. How strange that
profound difference between East and West. Why, in
some real way, the Sadhu, all Christian though he be,
is further away than are Plato and even Socrates! The
Sadhu's visions are strangely wooden, leathery things,
astonishingly other than, and inferior to, the revela-
tions or visions of Mother Julian or of St. Teresa.
It is in this matter especially that the object of the
book its object in the mind of Streeter, not, I think,
of Appasamy is not attained: the object being to
show that a man as entirely outside of any Christian
body or Church, can be as deep and delicate, as
valuable a mystic, as are the mystics belonging to
the Church. Streeter really proves the opposite of
what he wants to prove.

As to Plato, I am delighted you are taking to him so
strongly. I hope you will end by being steeped in him;
by having read all the Dialogues we have fixed upon
at least four times each; and that you will come to
be able to compare Dialogue with Dialogue, and to
use Plato generally, for comparison and criticism in
your non-Platonic reading. I am trying to follow you
in these your Plato readings: have so done the Protagoras
and half of the Gorgias. So glad you are at the Phesdrus
and soon at the Symposium. And mind to admire the
Meno I love it!

1 68 Ear on Von Hugel's

As to taking the three children abroad for those
three months, how excellent! Yet there is one modi-
fication of your plan which (but for possible valid
reasons contrary, unknown to me) would seem an
improvement to me. You very rightly regret the lack
of German and Italian among you four. But why not
hold out Germany and Italy as a reward, some other
year, of German and Italian acquired at least by
some of you? You would this coming 1922 go to France
and, if you liked, French Switzerland, staying, say, a
week or ten days in Paris there seeing thoroughly
the great galleries, Versailles, Fontainebleau, etc. Then
to the great cathedral cities Rouen, Tours, Orleans,
etc., and staying quietly, for, say, a month, in Brittany,
there really to know that fine earnest race. I am very
sure that staying in new countries, amongst other races,
is an immensely educative influence. But you must
really stay with them, speaking their language, sharing
their life. And I am equally sure that mere travel,
mere maximum moving about, is sterilising rather
than improving.

Loving old Uncle-Father,

H.

13 VICARAGE GATE, W.8

1 3 December, 1921.

So glad you have got the books, and letters and
article packet. No hurry for a letter from you, though
it will be most welcome when it comes!

This is merely to express my distress that you should
have attempted Plato's Parmenides or the Philebus. Have

Letters to a Niece 169

you forgotten how we settled that you would not touch
any of the six Critical Dialogues, as all being far too
difficult? I think that resolution most important, as
otherwise you will get bewildered, strained, and then
sick of Plato. You have plenty of him to read: Meno,
Cratylus, the Republic as long as four or five ordinary
Dialogues and the Laws, even longer; and then all
over again and again, comparing one with the others.
As to the Cure d'Ars pray read the two big volumes
before the little one. You will see how sweet old
Mile. Ars is also.

F. v. H.

13 VICARAGE GATE, LONDON, W.8

20 January, 1922.

Here I am, my darling Gwen-Child, scribbling to
you after getting released, only last night at eleven-
thirty (when I could turn into bed), from my last
three weeks' grind. I wonder a little, sometimes, my
little old thing, whether you quite realise the costing-
ness of my life what a lot it necessarily takes out of
me, how little of nerve and brain force it leaves me,
when my direct work of thinking and exploring in
and with Faith, Love and Practice has been done?
You see I cannot apprehend anything seriously with-
out tension, I mean my very way of taking anything
involves much tension. And this is why there readily
come misgivings to me when I gain any great influence
either with young men or with women (whether young
or not). For both these sets of God's creatures of my
fellow-creatures cannot, I think, stand much tension.

i jo Baron J^on Hugel^s

They either break down physically under it, or their
faith collapses under the strain, or (the best that can
happen to them) they either get away from such
strongly tensional individuals, or learn to dwell in such
individuals, upon the harmonies in them and not
the tensions anyhow, my Dearie, the costliness, at
least to myself, of the kind of work I have again been
at, plus the endless business, friendliness, etc., of the
time of year, have alone caused my silence.

I find that I have four letters from you unanswered,
except by a post card for the first, and another post
card for the last one. I will first write some words
about each of your chief points and, indeed, about
yourself generally. And I will then tell the chief doings
and experiencings since last I wrote you a letter.

First as to the letter 13 December. I am so glad
that you then, and later on again, liked the Cure
d'Ars so much. It seems to me you could, with great
profit, absorb into your life pretty well the whole of
him in his darling simplicity, his continuous self-
oblivion, his absorption in God, and yet his amazingly
large attention to others, especially to the poor and the
lost. I have just now been again using him amongst
my illustrations, and as always, with the greatest con-
fidence and consolation. You know that at Thekla's
convent the very experienced prioress has placed a
statuette (a beautiful one) of the cure in prayer on to
the table in the centre of their chapter house, as an
encouragement to them to persevere in their in his
in their joint kind of prayer of pure love.

Then I am so glad you love Plato's Meno so; it is
one of my favourite dialogues perhaps the one which
I carry most constantly in my head.

Letters to a Niece 171

Then there is the strange but very dear old clergyman
(here are his, somehow very sweet, letters back, with
thanks) . I am very glad he has got you to read Scott's
Heart of Midlothian a book I know well and admire
much. I am a bit surprised you had never read it!
But have you already noted one thing, Sweet? That
dear old cleric I feel quite sure is one more living
refutation of the "all men have something to hide"
doctrine. There is that about him which cannot coexist
with any sex impurity. Either he has never lost his
baptismal innocence (the more likely alternative,
I think), or he has long and long ago fully, deeply
repented of any early lapses that may have occurred.
St. Augustine is there to prove to all men of good
faith that such recovery is fully possible.

In this same letter you dwell upon how one helpful,
spiritual writer after the other turns out to be a
Roman Catholic, whereas the Protestant bodies, even
Anglicanism, have, most at least, to go to those others
for spiritual classics. I think this is no prejudice of
yours, my Gwen-child. But I think a certain advantage
is extant on the other side. Not, I think, in Protestantism
as such even there; but because, alongside of much
licence. Protestantism has at least ended by leaving
liberty to scholars. I mean even such liberty as is
necessary for a really cogent defence of the Catholic
Faith. The official representatives of the Catholic
Church, on the contrary, have mostly, or generally,
struck away from such liberty. Yet this advantage of
Protestantism is immediately lost by it when it becomes
pointedly, polemically Protestant; it is then at once
more narrow and unseeing than is the narrowest
Roman Catholicism. And certainly the finest Roman

172 Baron Von Huge/'s

Catholic scholars, when and where they are allowed
elbow-room, remain the worthy descendants of those
Roman Catholic scholars who so Mabillon the
Benedictine, Richard Simon the Oratorian, and Denys
Petau the Jesuit, all in the seventeenth century were
respectively the founders of the science of history,
of Biblical criticism, and of the history of Christian
dogma.

As to the letter of 2 1 December. You understand,
of course, that I have excluded that group of Plato's
Dialogues from your reading, only because of their
great technicality and difficulty. If the day comes
when, having read and re-read all the others, you
feel you know them so well that you could understand
fresh problems raised by him upon the conclusions
reached by him so far, you could then try your hand
at these dialogues also. Fortunately these dialogues
are much the least beautiful in form, and contain
least of sayings directly utilisable for religion or ethics.
But they are free from any such blemishes as appear
in the Symposium and the Republic.

I shall love your getting back to Plato.

Perhaps, by now, you have seen that review of my
book in the Times Literary Supplement, and my letter
there in answer to it. Mr. Bruce Richmond has written
me the kindest letter about it all that he had wished
to give me pleasure, and was so sorry he had failed.
But he added what took all distress about the incident
out of my mind that the review was not, as I thought,
by Canon Barnes (one of the canons of Westminster
Abbey), who, in a review of a book by Dean Inge,
had written a most handsome sentence about my
writings, and who (I sadly thought) had now changed

Letters to a Niece 173

his mind about my work. I still believe that my letter
was more or less necessary; but I see, as a friend
points out, that I have missed one of the chief diffi-
culties in cases such as that of Anthony Trollope
that he, Anthony Trollope, was, highly probably,
baptised, and validly baptised. Yet baptism, according
to the universal orthodox doctrine, implants in the
baptised soul the seeds of the supernatural life.

If I wrote the letter now, I would still bring up the
Anthony Trollopes of the world, but would declare
that I had never yet found a fully satisfactory answer
to the problem presented by such baptised persons, even
though I continued to feel that a doctrine, equivalent to
the ancient doctrine of Limbo, could be fruitfully used in
face of the problem of the apparently purely natural
goodness of at least many of the unbaptised.

And then the pathetic bit about your gardener's
father so ill; and the gardener's wife your only usual
companion at Holy Communion!

Then your letter of 29 December showed so well
how much and how exactly rightly you feel about
Christmas that immensely warm and expansive,
lowly and homely, utterly touching feast. And I love
to think of David at Holy Communion with you
there, and then you and Olivia at a service in the
cathedral. And then came the funeral of your
gardener's father.

What you say of the ignorance of the poor about
Our Lord and their practical heathenism is sad indeed,
yet I believe it true.

As to the young convert living out in the fields, I too
wonder about him. I mean, that he is being straight
and devoted is plain enough. But is he being wise?

174 Baron Von

And has he anyone wise to advise him, and does he
attend to such an one?

First, off and on during December I had a good deal
to do to help a lady whom I have known for, I think,
fifteen years at least, a woman who has much religious
influence with many souls; and who, if she succeeds in
becoming more harmonious and more deep in herself,
will do much pure good instead of as now, I think,
not a little harm mixed with some good. She asked
me to help her in all her spiritual views, practices,
etc. First she wrote me out very humbly and simply
as to where she stood, etc. I drew up, in response,
a rough set of rules and proposals which she came
here for me to develop to her. She was then asked to
let me have a second report as to how the proposals
struck her for direct execution in her life. And the
second report she then furnished was carefully criticised
by me in my final advice to her, which grew into a
bulky affair. It was impossible to be much shorter
with a person who has read very much and thought
very much; who began as a Pantheistically-inclined
Agnostic; and who, although she now, I am happy to
say, goes to Anglican Holy Communion, and indeed
also to Mass, and even to Benediction at the Carmelites
here, never, I found, prays to Our Lord; indeed she
declared that she never could do so! She has under-
taken to carry out, in great simplicity, the proposals
which I ended by making very definite. She would
strive gently to bring consistency into her life, by at
least thinking of Our Lord at Holy Communion; and
she would give as much time to visiting, and to attend-
ing to, the poor, as ever she could without neglecting
other duties. She has settled now to give two afternoons

Letters to a Niece 175

a week to them; and to try and learn by their needs
the need of religion of a definitely historical kind
the need of Our Lord, His Life, His Death, His Sacred
Person. She is to report at midsummer how things have
gone. My Gwen; you who have the great grace to love
and to worship Christ our Lord, pray for this soul,
please. I promise to tell you how she gets on. But,
purposely, I am not going to see her in between- whiles.
Then I have had vividly brought home to me a
difficulty (a purely social, educational difficulty which
all my life has dogged my steps) as to what degree of
experience, learning, tension, etc., is good and wise
for such and such young people, or (even generally)
for people generally. You see, I had felt so glad and
proud at the thought of Professor Troeltsch coming
with me, next July, to Swanwick, where he would
address some seven hundred young men and young
women university students on religion. I felt so sure
that the Christian Student Movement authorities
would accept this, that I told Troeltsch of my efforts,
adding that the thing could be quite sure only after
the Executive Committee had decided in September.
But when, at end of November, I still had received
no news, I wrote to the Secretary, Christian Student
Movement, asking what had become of the plan, and
Mr. Tatlow answered that as soon as he had put the
plan to the Executive Committee (all university
students), the large majority at once protested hotly
against it. That the Christian Student Movement
Statutes opened out with a declaration that only
Christians who accept the historic Creeds could belong
to the movement; that surely also only such Christians
could be asked by the Committee to speak to the young

ij6 Baron Von Hilgefs

people at this, their supremely religious, gathering; and
that if once they let in Professor Troeltsch, they would
not be able to exclude from their platforms Quakers
or Unitarians or Theosophists. That my own case
was distinctly different that they would much like
to have me:, but, as to Troeltsch, no. Mr. Tatlow added
that a small minority did want to have him; and that
he had thought the matter so important, that he was
asking a certain number of experienced mature friends
of the movement what they would have him do. And
that, meanwhile, he would like me to tell him clearly
why I had thought of Troeltsch for them, and again
how I felt, now that I had their statutes and this
opposition so plainly before me. To this I answered
that I had been close friends and the most careful
student with and of Troeltsch for some thirty-five
years; that, all that time, I had learnt nothing but
good, and the rarest good, from him, since he had
helped me greatly to keep and to increase a joyous
faith in God, and had brought me back to a full (and
fuller than ever) admiration of the Golden Middle
Age. That a Quaker, several liberal Lutherans (like
Troeltsch), and a Unitarian had much helped me
religiously, I mean right up to the consolidation of
my historic, Roman Catholic, Christian faith. Hence
I had felt these young people might greatly profit,
and would hardly suffer damage from Troeltsch.
That the mere fact of their statutes did not arrest me,
since even the best rules (and these seemed very good)
were liable to exceptions. And that I continued to
feel it very difficult to believe that even people so
young as his should not be exposed to influence far
more dangerous than could be the influence of Troeltsch

Letters to a Niece 177

in his least orthodox strain. Besides, that Troeltsch had
spontaneously undertaken not to speak a word which
had not previously been considered by me. And yet
that his, Mr. Tatlow's, communication had pulled me
up in this wise, that I had been made to remember
that I was at least thirty-five when Troeltsch first
came into my life, and a fully formed man, whereas
these young people were all between eighteen and
twenty-four. And then I had had to recognise how
I had, more than once (and once to a saddening
degree), myself presupposed too much maturity, too
much carrying power in those I had influenced, and
this had had, for long, very sad results. So that, unless
the seniors he had referred the matter to were prac-
tically all for Troeltsch, I wanted him, Mr. Tatlow,
to decide against asking him to Swanwick. End of
December, Mr. Tatlow wrote, definitely declining
to have Professor Troeltsch at Swanwick; that I still
did not realise what immature, unformed, callow,
ignorant minds they had to deal with. But that the
officials the mature and paid men of the movement
would esteem it an honour to listen to Troeltsch next
September, at their London meeting. I have still to
write to Troeltsch that the Swanwick thing is off, and
that I do not think the London thing would be worth
his coming all that way. I shrink from doing so, as
it may a bit pain that very sensitive man; but I must
just do it, as well as I can!

And then, lastly, these last three weeks have been
chock full of "Priest and Prophet."

I ended by scribbling out in pencil a MS. so long
that, though I spoke for seventy minutes, I could
only use up a little over a third of the whole. I learnt

1 7 8 Ear 'on Von Huge I 'j

a lot in working it out. I think the chief points which
I got to see more clearly than ever before were that
Jesus was in conflict, roughly speaking, not with the
priests that came only quite at the end, but with the
Pharisees, who were all laymen to a man; and again that
the reason of Our Lord's vehemence against them
was because, claiming to be the religious teachers of
the people at large, they made religion unbearably
heavy and complicated for the poor the poor being
precisely those to whom He had come to preach the
Good Tidings. This preaching to the poor, He had
placed as the culminating work and credential of His
life, in His great answer to the inquiry of John the
Baptist; and hence the glorious "Come unto Me,"
and the "laden and heavy burdened," with His
contrasting "yoke" which is "sweet," and His burden
which is light, aims, in the first instance, at the
Pharisees. Now the descendants of the Pharisees are,
quite plainly, not (at least not necessarily) priests,
but such over-cultivated Puritan lay theologians as,
e.g. the Unitarians. They, too, have no Gospel for the
poor, whereas Jesus has, and first of all for them; you
and I come afterwards! Also, the priests still, in
Jesus's time, stood for friendly contacts with matter;
the Pharisees, for vigilant hostility to all such contacts.
True, the Pharisees practised endless washings; but
these were for purification from all sorts of contacts
with matter of all kinds. And true, also, the priests
practised ablutions; yes, but they practised them as
preparations for contact with other kinds of matter,
in the sacrifice, the anointings, incense, etc. Jesus
stands out quite plainly on the contacts side: so in
the cure of the woman with the issue of blood, of the

Letters to a Niece 179

lepers, etc. All these things were an abomination to
the Pharisees.

Well now, Sweet, good night! Oh, may you succeed
in not over-straining your precious health and in
managing some grand rest, expansion and peace.
God bless you. Pray for me.

Loving old,

Uncle-Father.

13 VICARAGE GATE, LONDON, W.8

Darling Child, 24 January, 1922.

This only in answer to the confession questions.

1. You have hit upon the very difficulty which
I foresaw for you in any at all frequent confession.
It is one which you would feel, far more definitely,
if you were a Roman Catholic, having to confess
(if a frequent communicant) at least every three
weeks, as I do.

2. Confession is for sins, and nothing else. Hence
no confession of general unworthiness, also no con-
fession of general imperfections of your natural
character that you are too sensitive, too vehement,
etc.: all quite true, but no more for confession than
that your nose is too long. St. Francois de Sales was a
good while in getting St. Chantale out of the way of
confessing such constitutional defects.

3. Give yourself not more than fifteen minutes at
most of quiet, leisurely, circumspect, warm and loving
preparation gently recalling the situations in which
you have been since last confession: all this after, of
course, asking Our Lord to give you light and love

180 Baron Von Huget^s

for seeing. If anything then pricks you keep that for
your confession, always confessing first whatever may
be most difficult to confess, then make a gentle, quiet,
firm, but not straining, act of contrition. And after all
this no deliberate recurrence to the subject.

4. If nothing thus pricks you no strain, no trouble,
no occupation with this fact. But, if you do go to
confession notwithstanding, simply explain that you
could find nothing committed since the last confession,
so and so long ago; and re-confess the biggest thing you
confessed before but very gently, with your soul
turned to Christ, your light and love and life.

5. If Edward Talbot recommends you to go to
confession thus often (every six months) I should
like you to go, otherwise, to spread out the time even
more. For, as you know, in the Church's early cen-
turies, the faithful (saintly souls included) went only
for grave sin, in public confession, to the bishop. We
must not expect, I do not want that back. Still, the
relation between more or less deliberate sin and con-
fession it is certainly wise to keep up, as far as possible,
and not to let one's confessions degenerate into a sort
of flea-hunt, a straining to discover sins.

Pray for me.

Loving old Uncle,

F. v. H.

13 VICARAGE GATE, W.8

My darling Gwen-Child, 28 February, 1922.

I was sorry to see your half-sheet to Aunt Mary this
morning I mean, as to your chill and sickness. For,

Letters to a Niece 181

as to your coming here for those nights, it is, of course,
delicious. We both like this, very much. And we will
have, I trust, at least two talks, won't we? I can easily
manage such in the afternoons. Friday and Saturday,
I have teaching; but even then we would arrange
or for after dinner though, no, that is Aunt Mary's
time with you.

Aunt Mary thinks you will have caught this chill
in this my study, which is, of course, a further reason
for distress. But I undertake to have a good fire alight
half an hour before you turn up in here, unless the
weather is truly summery.

I trust, though, you will now be quickly right again.
You said nothing about headaches; I trust that means
they have hardly molested you lately.

After our talk I had some scruples I felt that I
had, somehow, been straining your brain, and that
for matters more of general religiosity than of the
definite religion we love. I will try to do better next
time. Also I never asked after the children their
health; whilst you asked so nicely after us three.

Well, I also write because I like to be in touch
with you on starting Lent to-morrow. I am again
cutting myself off from buying any books for myself
till after Easter. But that would hardly do for you, you
buy, doubtless, so few, Sweet. You have so many
trials sent you by God, Dearie your headaches,
housework (when considerable), money anxieties and
bigger trials still, that I suspect the trying to meet and
utilise all this extra well during the forty days will be
all, and quite enough, for you, unless Edward Talbot
has made some suggestions they would be sure to
be wise.

1 82 Baron Von

I have been having a strange correspondence with
Loisy, on a point which shows how strangely unalive
he is to the most obvious evidences counter to his
utterly inadequate Religion of Humanity. He actually
claims that M. Littre's last months that all that
M. Huvelin observed then, is a fine illustration of this,
Loisy's, present conception of religion. Whereas, of
course, it is precisely the opposite. M. Littre had
lived fifty years a believer in, and propagator of, that
"Religion." And then God sent him an experience
which made him feel a new world in process of reveal-
ing itself to him, in which a keen sense of sin, a deep
contrition, were central. Loisy argues that because
M. Littre did not die an explicit Catholic or Christian,
or even Theist, there was no change within the
"Religion of Humanity." Strange obtuseness in one
usually so even excessively awake!

Well, Sweet, get well, Blessing; don't overwork either
body or mind or soul. God loves you and touches you
to love Him. What more do we want?

Loving old Fatherly,

F. v. H.

You must not hurry on the readings, all can wait!
At Holy Communion for you to-morrow morning,
Child.

13 VICARAGE GATE, W.8

My darling Gwen-Child, 1 1 April, 1922.

I want you to get a letter from me on the day of
Olivia's confirmation. Indeed I have also written
herself a little one enclosed which pray give to her.

Letters to a Niece 183

I so love to trust and believe that she will take the
act really seriously, and that the Christian's fight
against "self" whatever may be the particular form
and degree of "self" in the particular soul will begin,
or rather will grow deeper and firmer, with her
to-morrow.

My darling Niece-Child! How happy I am to think
of you in bed, and in bed, and in bed, and not doing
anything, not even reading, beyond just what your
strength permits ! What a lot we can grow spiritually
that is, how much more solidly anchored in the peace
and beatitude of God we can become by simply thus
resigning ourselves, as cheerfully as- possible, to such
do-nothing, which indeed, where and when nature
requires it, can be most refreshing.

I am so glad, too, you listen and watch the birds.
I shall try and get for you a "remainder" copy (the
book is quite out of print) of Alfred Newton's Dictionary
of Birds a truly engrossing work. There you can read
up all about the particular habits, migrations, etc., of
each of these birds.

I have striven to find for you those L.S.S.R. remarks
of mine on the four papers about God so far without
success. But I do not doubt I shall end by finding and
sending you them. The two Beaconsfield addresses are,
I find, in a lady's hands, who has promised their early
return. These also you shall have as soon as I get them
back, but to-day I send you something that I spoke a
week ago at an extra meeting of our L.S.S.R. The copy
of my remarks is for you to keep; the abstract of
Mr. Joseph Wicksteed's paper is for you to return
some time, when quite done with. Joseph Wicksteed
is the son of that very noble man certainly a most

184 Baron Von Hugefs

striking intelligence Philip Wicksteed (great on
Dante and Aquinas).

I was very happy, though, whilst working at this
criticism of mine; my toil at my new book helped me
greatly there.

I loved both your little letters, dear Child; but never
write when feeling too tired you shall have a copy,
all your own, of Charles Foucauld; but just at this
moment I have lent this copy, which I wanted to return
to you at once, to a man friend. I felt that Foucauld's
heroic life would draw him, somehow, out of his
deep depression.

Have you thought of Scott's Waverley Novels for
reading, when you want to read and yet are too tired
for harder books? I think you do not know them
certainly not all; the Heart of Midlothian was new to
ycu you would find The Antiquary, Old Mortality,
Rob Roy, Quentin Durward, Kenilworth, Fortunes of Nigel,
Peveril of the Peak, first rate. But I will not press you,
because I myself, when very tired, find but little help
in novels; to lie in the dark room or to prowl in the
open with Puck that does me far more good!

We shall love to have you for that night; and if you
could turn up by five or even six, you and I might
have a good talk before dinner I shall keep myself
free for that', after dinner I shall want Aunt Mary to
have you. I will show you that big history of De
Ranee and the beginnings of the Trappists, because
I fancy it would much interest you; as sometimes a
long detailed book is better for browsing through, when
one is ill, than are shorter, more concentrated affairs.

Darling Puck has a cyst on the right side of his
neck was with the vet. yesterday but this very

Letters to a Niece 185

experienced man says that we can enjoy the darling
little friend still for several years.

How stupid of me to think you could walk about,
and stand, etc., amongst your poor! But London
shopping that, too, is surely not the thing for you!
Limit it and the like, Dear, all you can, pray!

Loving old Uncle,

F. v. H.

On Maundy Thursday, day after to-morrow, at my
Holy Communion, on that, one of my dearest days, the
little old Niece-Child will, of course, be very specially

prayed for, and Olivia, indeed all three, and H

too! God bless you, Child.

13 VICARAGE GATE, KENSINGTON

From Letter of 23 May, 1922.

I am most glad you specially love the Psalms for
vocal prayer you are here, as I find so generally
with you, entirely in the mind of the Church. But
I trust that you do not neglect the Our Father, the
Apostles' Creed, and the Acts of Faith, Hope and
Charity and Contrition the first and these last in
all your morning and night prayers. My business
began with that meeting of our L.S.S.R. in this house,
when I tried to show that Our Lord's vehemence
against the Pharisees was indeed sincere, and must
be taken by us as indicating grave error in the
Pharisees, yet that it also was a revival, after some
six hundred years, of the old, pre-exilic tone and form
of prophetic denunciation. Amos, Hosea, Isaiah,

1 86 Baron Von Hugel's

Jeremiah, they all, pretty well unbrokenly, speak as
though the only sinners on the land were the men who
went to church! as though only a quite perfect moral
life (an ideal never quite attained) left public worship
anything but a thing without value to God or man
indeed a thing abominable to God and His prophets.
There is quite demonstrably here a certain exaggera-
tion, an "either . . . or," instead of "both . . . and."
History teaches us quite plainly that there exists no
such thing as strong and persistent religion without
public worship, and no public worship which supports
itself under and by pure contemptuous toleration or
cheery matter-of-courseness. Public worship requires
much care, much nurture: does it deserve all these
pains? Why, of course, yes y and YES again.

Then my dear friend Duchesne's death, on 2 1 April,
but known to me only on 30 April, gave me from
3 May to 17 May much, much trouble and some
anxiety in the study of his letters to me and the making
up of my mind what to insert in my letter to the
T.L.S., and how much to tell of the difficult matters
of debate which so largely filled his life and my feelings
and judgments. The thing was to have appeared this
week, but is now put off to next week a truly diffi-
cult thing. But, mind, Dear, he was not "pere"
not a religious, but simply a secular priest, like
Abbe Huvelin. Then came the final settlements
with Mr. Thorold for his seeing my Mystical Element
through the press.

Then, on 17 May, tea with a sweet old, one-legged,
Jewish gentleman, full of woe as to the rampant
anti-Semitism of our day. A dear old thing; must
talk about him another time.

Letters to a Niece 187

And then, 10-20 May, to Cambridge, with Aunt
Mary, for my brother's honorary degree and garden-
party. Hillie came down for the day.

My little old thing: this really must do for now.
God bless you, and make you well, and help you
to live, for these months, as much just simply for
getting well as ever you can. I trust once at Peg
Antrim's you will be in clover for these purposes.
Drop, then, all else.

Loving old Uncle-Father,

F. v. H.

I send you nothing till you ask, indeed that is not
important, nothing is, except what may help you to
rest and to get well.

13 VICARAGE GATE

My darling Gwen-Child, 29 June, 1922.

This is the day of my first Holy Communion fifty-five
years ago! So I must just write you a scrap at last! For
that should be the very centre of a Christian's devotional
life; to live up to that, no one can; but Christ can and
will help, if only we are attentive and generous.

I really could not write these last nearly three
weeks, I fear it is. For I began with a very distinct
nervous breakdown such an old acquaintance that!
Why, from eighteen to nearly thirty my life was pretty
well blotted out by such troubles! They are very
salutary for one, I find they make one feel one's
utter dependence upon God, even for getting away
from utter self-absorption, which then seizes one all

1 88 Baron Von Hugel's

round. Nothing but dark rooms and much open air
is then possible, but that is infallible as a gradual
restorative after a week or ten days.

Since then I have been in a condition of brainwork
in the night, when deep points where I have been
stuck for the last two years are getting wonderfully
clear. But this also is very wearing, and also humbles
one finely. I no more know how these lights are
reached than I know how a penny in the slot should
issue in a good, right railway ticket.

Two nights ago I had such absorbing pains of a
kind I knew well those which began the months of
trouble which ended, twice, in big operations, that
I went round yesterday to the surgeon that did them.
But he found, for quite certain, that nothing of the
kind was preparing, and that all the parts concerned
are in perfect condition. That the pain was sciatica
or rheumatism seizing hold of the old parts, because
specially sensitive, I suppose, after all those happen-
ings; this was a great relief to know, for otherwise
my Giffords would have become uncertain.

Now, as to yourself, Child. I quite see the reason
for your settling in London it seems to me unanswer-
able, and that neither your love of the country nor

H 's dislike of such a move should deter you from

it. After all, by getting high up and with some open
space and greenery around you, it need not be
emphatically towny.

I at once inquired of Mrs. Stuart-Moore, whom
I now know well, and who has lived for years on the
highest part here, in Campden Hill Square. Please,
Dear, note carefully what she writes in the two notes
enclosed. The second note is entirely about this

Letters to a Niece 189

matter. Pray specially note what I have underlined in
blue, in the first note. You will see what a warm, kind
soul she is! Don't want these back, second half of
first note was too private to send on.

Hope to write about emotion soon.

How excellent Lundy Island sounds !

Loving,

Uncle-Father.

THURSLEY, NEAR GODALMING, SURREY

My ever darling Gwen-Child, 21 August, 1922.

What a wonderful place you have struck, for
genuineness and always vital action and conviction!
And yet there is also a further fact, to be deeply
grateful for, that not only you yourself, but the three
children too, possess tastes so direct and so genuine
so unspoilt by the "fine" world and by "good"
society as to respond to it all and deeply to love it!
Perhaps especially the letter of 18 August, received
this morning, makes me feel this double gratitude
for you, all four, very much indeed. Certainly, if such
a place cannot keep people genuine, no place could!
You will be able to come back to it all every year, or
at least often. But to live there entirely would hardly
do, for any one of you four!

I am struck with what you say about church of
people, even there, not going into it to pray out of
service times. My difficulty about this springs from the
fact that with us Roman Catholics the frequentation
of our churches at such times springs, I think, entirely

190 Baron Von Htige/^s

or all but entirely, from the Reserved Holy Eucharist,
and our Devotion to It. I doubt whether we have got
any more, or any very different, feeling, towards any
church or chapel of our own where (a rare thing)
there is no Reservation, than Protestants have towards
their churches out of service-times. Now, though the
Reservation of the Holy Eucharist is very old we
can trace it back well into pre-Constantinian times
yet the Devotion to the Reserved Holy Eucharist is
not older in England than about A.D. 1330, and,
I think, nowhere older than this anywhere. This is
curious, because the Reservation was always reverent,
and I know of no documents or facts to indicate that
the Catholics of all those centuries disbelieved in the
real Presence of Our Lord at such times (the restric-
tion of His Presence to the time between the conse-
cration and the communion is, I believe, a purely
Protestant notion). The Greek Russian Church, e.g.,
does not have it, but believes (and practises, or rather
has no active devotion) exactly as Western Christendom
believed and practised up to A.D. 1330 or so. What
happened to and in the Catholic churches up to about
1330? outside of service-times, I mean. I think there
must have been some praying there in between- whiles;
yet I doubt whether there was as much as since the
awakening of the Devotion to the Reserved Holy
Eucharist. It is this Devotion and Confessions of
Devotion which have largely built up the Roman
Catholic saints these last six centuries. Whereas devo-
tion to the Holy Eucharist at Mass and Communion
only, and confessions of obligation, which built up the
Roman Catholic saints in the first thirteen centuries.
Am so glad to think you are coming to Vicarage

Letters to a Niece 191

Gate in September. I am to be in Thursley myself
(the address on this letter will alone be wanted) till
7 September for certain; but I am keeping myself
open to stay on till 14 September or even 21 September
(at most), in case health still requires it. Yet of course
I much want to see you at home. Aunt Mary will
certainly like to see you to have you stay the longer,
the better.

Loving Uncle-Father,

F. v. H.

Three sets of books, October igss. Two sets are for close
study; the third set, a single book, is for lighter reading.
Any one set can be studied, and the lighter book be
read, at different times of the same day. But only one
of the harder sets to be studied at the same time, and
to be finished, before the second set is tackled.

I. Three books (four volumes) on and oj Aquinas.

1 . Philip Wicksteed on The Reactions . . . St. Thomas
Aquinas.

A fine book by a lover of Aquinas. But Wicksteed is
a Unitarian, and hence unperceptive as to revealed
theology. Pray read twice, all the English parts (that
is, only the lectures and not the notes), also the Preface
(pages vii-xvi).

I would either omit Lecture III. (pages 157-196)
and the second half of Lecture IV. (pages 260-78) ;
or I would read it with aloofness and critical awakeness.

2. St. Thomas, God and His Creatures.

I would study all carefully, at least once. Pages
196-235 I would read and re-read, and copy out
bits; glorious!

192 Baron Von Hugel's

3. Aquinas Ethicus, two volumes.

I would read all at least once; and would carefully
re-read and browse amongst the parts which specially
help you. Be patient with your not understanding of
much at first.

13 VICARAGE GATE, W.8

My darling Gwen-Child, 26 May, 1923.

Many thanks for prompt loan of this. Have taken
all the particulars I wanted now; so here it is back.

There is one thing I much want you to undertake,
and so to quiet me. Promise you will instantly drop EVERY
WORD OF DANTE'S "INFERNO." I myself have never
dared read more than scraps of it. Go to the Paradiso,
and study this again and again. At first, each canto
at least three times.

It would grieve me so if you get repelled by Dante,
who otherwise could and will become part of your
food and air your daily food, your daily air.

I pray daily specially for what you told me of. God
bless and brace and bear with us all!

Loving old Fatherly Uncle,

F. v. H.

Am mending; but still, bedroom for two or three
more days.

13 VICARAGE GATE, KENSINGTON, W.8

My darling Gwen-Child, n July, 1923.

A matter goes revolving in my head about you,
which, I think, I had better mention now, since you

Letters to a Niece 193

may be acting on it before we meet again next Monday.
You told me you had promised I did not catch whom

to read again 5 s last book; and indeed you took

away my copy for the purpose. I have been feeling
somewhat cross with anybody who would ask such
a thing of you, since it doubtless means a wish that
you may, after all, come to like the book, and you
may then praise it, to the pleasure of all the author's
family. And I think you could get yourself to do so,
or at least to try. I care much for that family and
wish them every consolation, yet I cannot doubt that
we none of us ought that we none of us have the
right to put this kind of pressure upon others. And
to enter into such an affectionate little plot is, surely,
not good for one's straightness for that complete
sincerity which alone gives value and the power to
produce genuine pleasure to our literary judgments.
But this point, too I mean the moral point here
involved is for you to decide upon and follow, not
for me to impose upon you. I only bring it up because
you might acquire the habit before you had fully
made up your mind.

And so that is thatl It is simply for yourself, Child.
Perfect simplicity, never forcing the note: this we
will try and combine with kindliest reserve and
softening judgments where we can. But not more.
No court paid to families, etc.

Old Father,

F. v. H.

Q

194 Baron Von Huge/'s

13 VICARAGE GATE, LONDON, W.8

My darling Child, 22 October, 1923.

I loved getting your post card this morning some
two hours ago, and hearing you had had so beautiful
a Retreat. Of course I am keenly looking forward to
seeing you when you are back, and when we can hit
off a day and time to fit us both perhaps next Monday,
as before.

But I write because I want, if I can, promptly to
get quite clear in my old mind a matter that has been
a bit perplexing me. I have to take gas and have one
molar out this afternoon; and gas again and another
molar out some few days hence; and it will be joy
indeed, if I find that I was simply mistaken in the
following matter and learn this in between the two
little woes.

You see, my Sweet, you used to write to me often
the oftener the better for me (provided the writing
came spontaneously to you, without a touch of obligation
about it}. And I loved getting these letters and learnt
not a little from them, even though, latterly, I was
mostly too tired to answer by letter. And then you came
to Thursley, and I loved our time I felt we had no
straining, etc., between us. You went off: well, and
thenceforward, somehow, the letters ceased. A pencil
note, merely as to health; then, quite shortly ago, a
joint little letter to Aunt Mary and me this was all
during nine or ten weeks. But yesterday Hillie came
and, among other things about other people, told me
you had found me very tired at Thursley, and had
felt you ought not, then, to put any questions to me.
So I have come to think that probably you kept

Letters to a Niece 195

silent, also as to letters, for my sake to save me even
the reading of them.

This morning's post card is so entirely the darling
daughter, that I feel Hillie's report must be covering
all. And so I feel I had better at once explain that
if you have not written as formerly (I mean as to the
quantity) on my account, I trust you will promptly drop
any such notion and practice. Your letters simply
rest and refresh me. But this, because they feel quite
unforced, because I feel you to write them simply as
the bird sings. And so, if you have kept yourself from
writing, even partly, because of yourself- because it strained
or hipped or otherwise tried you do not write as formerly
till this feeling, if God wills, disappears. It has been the
fear that, by telling you all this, I might put pressure
upon you, Child, that has kept me so long from saying
anything. But when this Retreat of yours came and
went without any account of it, I felt I must, somehow,
find out. You are, Sweet, a humble soul, and may have
thought I attached no importance to your letters. If it
was all for my sake, you might now write me an account
of the Retreat, still all fresh in your memory.

Ever loving Uncle-Father,

H.

13 VICARAGE GATE

My darling Child, All Saints' Eve, 1923.

Here, for All Saints', is, at last, Elisabeth Leseur's
Journal for you. Tried to get it ready-bound for you
but is not to be had like that; and I did not want to
wait till I had got it bound for you nowadays a long

196 Baron Von HugeTs

process. I have got, at same time, a copy of my own
so we can refer each other to anything we come upon
we like very much.

The three little books are simply the remaining
volumes of the Temple Dante, not yet taken home
by you. Mind you sometime read the Monarchy in the
Latin Works volume.

I loved getting your last %po and National Gallery
letter. We must talk about all in it on Monday next.

Have, at last, plunged again into my big book
composition, which I find turns into a prayer and
makes me very happy was missing it greatly. But
this will make all mornings impossible to me for
anyone even the child I am scribbling this to.

May we have a very, very deep and dear All Saints'
the day of all the saints in all times and places and
disguises so much the most of them known to God
alone; indeed the day also of the saintly bits, the
saintly moments, etc., the beginnings of sanctity in
souls, not otherwise saints at all.

God be with us.

Your loving,

Father.

13 VICARAGE GATE, W.8

My darling Child, 4 November, 1923.

Grateful thanks again, for the last interesting letters.
I could not answer your practical question as to the
two hours taken by you in that church, at once; and
even now I can write only by doing so when I ought
not to do so on Sunday, which works the full rest-
fulness for me only if I do not break in upon it at all.

Letters to a Niece 197

I think your decision wise as far as its interior goes
that it will not strain you, accustomed and so happy as
you are to and in long prayer. But is it wise with your
health to tie yourself down thus to fixed days and
hours? I wonder. *Tis for you to watch how the
arrangement works; and if the health really and
clearly interferes with it, to give it up, I think.

As to to-morrow, Child, I shall love to see you, as
always, and shall be sorry if you do not come, as
always. But I feel as though it would be right for me
not to accept your not coming if your cold is still at a
very fountainous stage, since I am specially hopeful just
now of avoiding grave, deep colds which would
interfere with my resumed composition work even
perhaps my getting to our opening meeting of the
L.S.S.R. at Mr. Montefiore's on Tuesday day after
to-morrow. But I trust your cold is getting fairly a
dry one now, in which case, pray, pray, come, Sweet.
In any case, mind to understand that the cold, in an
acute condition, is the sole and complete objection to
your coming.

I shall, otherwise, so greatly delight over our hour
after lunch here to-morrow.

I think Aunt Mary expects you fixedly already; if
so, please telephone only if you are not coming.

Loving old Father-Uncle,

H.

Walter Frerc, Bishop of Truro! Well, I hope and
believe he will make a very good, because a super-
naturally-minded, one.

How grand Elisabeth Leseur is is she not?

H.

198 Baron Von Hilgel's

13 VICARAGE GATE

Darling Child, 17 March, 1924.

This is to dwell for a moment with you in gratitude
and deepest life- wishes for Olivia seventeen to-day!
Dear me! Clearly no more a child and yet, please
God, with something of the child in her to the end!
She is evidently an honourable, straight character,
and God's grace and her own freely docile co-operation
will slowly build up of all for something deep and
tender.

And this wants, too, for a moment, to dwell upon
your renouncing this Retreat. I wish now I had said
nothing whatever in criticism of your going thus a
third time a year to a Retreat. For it is difficult to
see what precise harm there would be even in four
such, provided they really brace and soothe you, the
fact being that they are far more just times of escape
from racket and to more prayer than usual. And
again, I did and do see that having you at this Retreat

would especially please Mrs. ; and this too would

be a pleasure surely not wrong, this although certainly
such things ought primarily to be done because we
ourselves require them. I do not propose your, after
all, going, because to wobble up and down is never a
good thing in itself; but if you have still left it half
open and you still, at bottom, feel that attrait to it
as just a (third) opportunity for more rest away, and
prayer, then I incline not to abandon it, but quickly
settle it up as a thing you are going to do.

I have written to Mrs. this morning, not about

this, either way, but full of good will towards her, as
indeed I ought to be.

Letters to a Niece 199

Well, anyhow, to Thursday at one and two much
talk, Child.

Loving Fatherly One,

H.

13 VICARAGE GATE, KENSINGTON, W.8

12 August, 1924.
My darling Gwen-Child, (Gertrude f 1915.)

I have been rather pursued by the fear that you
might not get your cheque in time for such cashing
of it as you may care to effect before leaving London
on Thursday; and so, although I am looking forward
(and much) to seeing you to-morrow (Wednesday),
I am sending it enclosed to-night so as to reach you
at home to-morrow (Wednesday, first post). I suppose
you reach Hanover Terrace to-night; and, in any
case, this letter will await you safely in your house.
If you do arrive to-night, you can (if you like) cash
the cheque in the morning to-morrow.

I also want to say that I have got St. Bernard's
Sermons on the Canticle of Canticles, two volumes, for you.
The volumes are stout but not large, so that I fancy
you can easily take Volume I. to Lundy, if you like.
It might be well to begin such a great new book out
there.

I was so glad all went so well at that interview you
feared so much in anticipation. I was very pleased to
get that letter, and now the little one. But how nice
to be talking together to-morrow.

Hillie is still away for a little Surrey visit; and Aunt
Mary may be still away to-morrow. My chair takes

2OO Baron Von Hilge/'s

me out from three to five, and I have my tea at five.
Juliet Mansell has to be at her rehearsals till about
six-thirty. I should like you to arrive for your tea at
Jive, and to come down to me at five-thirty. Thus you
will see Aunt Mary or Hillie, if either of them is back;
and if you have to be alone with Eva looking after
you! It will be for only half an hour.

Nothing in this letter wants an answer till you
answer me by word of mouth as to the cheque and
the book.

Loving Fatherly Uncle,

F. v. H.

13 VICARAGE GATE, KENSINGTON

Sunday, 14 September, 1924.
My darling Gwen-Child,

I find Professor Kemp Smith is right, who scolded
me for dictating him a long letter, for even that day
it markedly diminished the benefit of my rest. But this
is the last day of my holiday I hope to begin work
anew to-morrow, although this persistent wet through-
out more or less all the six weeks has much limited
the good derived from the rest. One long letter I could
not help writing to Sir Archibald Geikie, whose auto-
biography has been the great delight of my holiday,
and who will be eighty-nine in December next dear
warm heart, and pure, still very (mentally) active and
deeply religious life.

As to a Jowett's Plato for Richard, I am carefully
seeking a good, five-volume, copy can well afford it
for Christmas. When I have got it, I shall give it to

Letters to a Niece 201

you, for you to give to him. Say nothing of my inter-
vention, please. I so love to think you say or imply
literally nothing when (as so often) this is desirable.
Hope Aunt Mary's letter has reached you; she told
me she would write to you. Hillie has been staying
with Beatrice Thynne.

Loving Uncle,

Freddy.

MADE AT THE
TeMPLeTpsess

LeTCH&VORTH

BOOKS BY
BARON von HUGEL

DETAILS OF THE WORKS OF

BARON FRIEDRICH von HUGEL

WILL BE FOUND IN THE

FOLLOWING PAGES

PUBLISHERS

J. M. DENT & SONS LTD.

BEDFORD STREET: LONDON :W.C.2

ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES

ON THE

PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

FIRST SERIES
Third (and cheaper) Edition. Large Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. net

CONTENTS: I. CONCERNING RELIGION IN GENERAL
AND THEISM. Responsibility in Religious Belief Religion and
Illusion; and Religion and Reality Progress in Religion Pre-
liminaries to Religious Belief.

II. CONCERNING THE TEACHING OF JESUS AND
CHRISTIANITY IN GENERAL. The Apocalyptic Element in
the Teaching of Jesus The Specific Genius of Christianity What
do we mean by Heaven? and what do we mean by Hell?

III. CONCERNING THE CHURCH AND CATHOLICISM
GENERALLY. The Essentials of Catholicism The Convictions
common to Catholicism and Protestantism Institutional Christi-
anity Christianity and the Supernatural. INDEX.

SECOND SERIES
Second Impression. Medium 8vo. 15s. net

CONTENTS: I. Official Authority and Living Religion. II. The
Place and Function of the Historical Element in Religion. III. On
the Place and Function, within Religion, of the Body, of History, and
of Institutions. IV. On certain Central Needs of Religion, and the
Difficulties of Liberal Movements in Face of the Needs: as Experi-
enced within the Roman Catholic Church during the last forty years.
V. The Idea of God. VI. Morals and Religion. VII. Suffering
and God. VIII. The Facts and Truths concerning God and the
Soul which are of most importance in the Life of Prayer. IX. The
Catholic contribution to Religion. X. The Difficulties and Dangers
of Nationality. INDEX.

SELECTED LETTERS
18961924

EDITED WITH A MEMOIR
by BERNARD HOLLAND

Second Impression. Medium 8vo. 380 pages. 21s. net

The aim followed in this selection has been that of illustrating the
intellectual position, and, still more, the human affections and
tender sympathies of this wonderfully many-sided man. The volume
contains also notes of the sayings of Abbe Huvelin, notes made by
Baroness Hildegard von Hiigel, and a complete index.

9" Baron von Hiigel was our greatest theologian and the ablest apologist for
Christianity in our time. What a splendid defence of the Christian faith
may be gathered from his writings .' " DEAN INGE.

LETTERS TO A NIECE

EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION
by GWENDOLEN GREENE

Second Impression. Large Crown 8vo. 240 pages. 7s. 6d. net

EXTRACT FROM MRS. GREENE'S INTRODUCTION

SOME of these letters have been published already in the Collected
Letters of Friedrich von Hiigel, others have not yet appeared in print.
They are now collected and issued separately for those people to
whom the larger book may be a difficulty the people who are not
interested in the more directly philosophical and theological sides
of religion. . . .

I am adding to these letters the conversations that I had with my
uncle during the same period of time. (Much, I am afraid, has been
forgotten, though the impression remains.) They express the same
desire, they have the same aim. He wanted, as he says somewhere,
to train me "in faith, trust and love of God, Christ, and the Church."
They help fill in to some extent the picture that I would like to
give of him. It is a double picture, a picture of him teaching, and
a picture of what he taught. . . .

It was not till 1919 that he began his regular talks with me. I sat
beside him, always on the same little low chair (just as we always
had to keep to the same day, if possible it had some tremendous
significance!). I always felt like a child with my uncle, and I never
attempted to be anything else. As he said, I had to learn, and I am
still in a spiritual childhood. Everything was carefully prepared
before my arrival. He liked me best to knit while I listened. He
said people always listened best when they did something with their
hands, more especially women. (How I wish those words of his could
meet the eyes of impatient governesses!) His plan was all thought
out: he wanted to try and strengthen my character, feed my soul:
and I was to learn through history, as well as through religion itself.
"I want to prepare you, to organise you for life, for illness, crisis,
and death"; and the essence of his first as of his last talk might be
said in his own words: "Live all you can as complete and full a
life as you can find do as much as you can for others. Read,
work, enjoy love and help as many souls do all this. Yes but
remember: Be alone, be remote, be away from the world, be desolate.
Then you will be near God!"

flf " Were we asked to name the Roman Catholic thinkers who have in
J) modern rimes left an enduring mark on the religious mind of England
we should mention Newman and we should mention Friedrich von Hugel,
but no third without doubts and reservations. . . . Von Hugel shows
himself, in his letters as in his books, the most persuasive, because the most
widely informed, the most restrained and the most candid champion of
institutional religion that our age has seen ... a great servant of humanity
in its spiritual advance." THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT.

THE MYSTICAL
ELEMENT OF RELIGION

AS STUDIED IN SAINT CATHERINE
OF GENOA AND HER FRIENDS

Two volumes. New and Revised Edition. Medium 8vo. 35s. net

Baron von Hiigel's greatest book, dealing with the historical and
philosophical bases of his belief, and accepted as authoritative.

VOLUME I.

INTRODUCTORY. I. The Three Chief Forces of Western Civili-
sation. II. The Three Elements of Religion. BIOGRAPHICAL.

III. Catherine Fiesca Adorna's Life, up to her Conversion; and the
Chief Peculiarities predominant throughout her Convert years.

IV. Catherine's Life from 1473 to 1506, and its Main Changes and
Growth. V. Catherine's Last Four Years, 1506-1510. Sketch of
her Character, Doctrine, and Spirit. VI. Catherine's Doctrine.
VII. Catherine's Remains and Cultus ; the Fate of her Two Priest
Friends and of her Domestics; and the remaining History of Ettore
Vernazza. VIII. Battista Vernazza's Life. APPENDIX.

PART II

CRITICAL. IX. Psycho-Physical and Temperamental Questions.
X. The Main Literary Sources of Catherine's Conceptions. XI.
Catherine's Less Ultimate This-World Doctrines. XII. The After-
Life Problems and Doctrines. XIII. The First Three Ultimate
Questions. XIV. The Two Final Problems: Mysticism and Pan-
theism. The Immanence of God, and Spiritual Personality, Human
and Divine. XV. Summing-up of the Whole Book.

THE LIFE OF PRAYER

Small Crown 8vo. Second Impression. 2s. 6d. net

The two addresses contained in this volume were delivered by Baron
von Hugel at Beaconsfield on a6th October and 27_th October,
1921, and were published in the Second Series of his Essays and
Addresses on the Philosophy of Religion. They are here re-issued in a
separate form in the belief that they will appeal to a wider circle
of readers.

THE GERMAN SOUL

Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net

An elucidation of the character of the German (in contrast with the
English) soul, the present deviation, and the helps and hindrances
furnished by the chief groups of German religion and philosophy.

9 "A great scholar and a great saint, a profound lover of Qod and man. A
fervent Roman Catholic, but a no less fervent lover of truth, a man keen,
eager, and fearless; a man intellectually the peer of the very ablest in the land,
yet no less ready to take endless pains for little people of moderate brains, and
withal so humble, so alive to goodness in lowly places." c. G. MONTEFIORE in

THE JEWISH GUARDIAN.

READINGS FROM
FRIEDRICH von HUGEL

EDITED, WITH AN
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY by ALGAR THOROLD

Large Crown 8vo. 360 pages. 7s. 6d. net

MR. ALGAR THOROLD has collected in this book the permanent
quintessence of the Baron's teaching, to which he has prefixed an
essay on the significance of his religious philosophy. Wide as Von
HugePs appeal has proved to be, it is probable that it has been to
some extent limited by the necessarily high price of the original
works and their occasional obscurity of style. It is hoped that this
selection will make his work known to the greater public.

CONTENTS

BOOK I : THE APPROACH TO RELIGION

An Abiding Enigma of Life Hellenism, Christianity and Science, all Three Necessary
to Man The Three Means of Religious Apprehension The Difficulties of Transition
The Three Constituents of Knowledge The Three Elements in the Great Religions The
Religious Temper longs for Simplification Science: Brute Fact and Iron Law The Achieve-
ment of Science The Relations of Science and Religion Christianity, the Revelation of
Personality and Depth Christianity: Pessimist and Optimist The Scientific Habit and
Mysticism Social Religion and Mysticism Eternal Life Given in Experience The Sense
of Eternal Life.

BOOK II : THE SOUL OF A SAINT

St. Catherine of Genoa The Marriage of Catherine The Theological Value of Catherine's
Spirit Sources of Catherine's Doctrine -God and Creation The Sin of Self -Love Catherine
and Pure Love Catherine's Spiritual Significance The Teaching of Catherine What We
may Learn from Catherine Catherine's Interpretative Religion Catherine's Fasts
Catherine and the Plague The Three Categories and the Two Ways The Other Worlds
Catherine and the Blessed Sacrament Some Peculiarities of Devotion Her General Af ter-
Life Conceptions Catherine and Eternal Punishment Catherine and Purgatory Catherine
and Heaven Catherine and Her Disciples Catherine's Death.

BOOK III : THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

Responsibility and Belief The Inequality of Religious Endowment The Dual Source
of Difficulties in the Spiritual Life The Social Dynamics of Belief Perfect and Imperfect
Liberty Religion and Reality The Characteristics of the Object of Religion An Analysis
of Experience Anti-Religious Psychology The Vivid Dimness of Religious Belief Chris-
tianity and Suffering The Eschatology of the Gospel Critical Method and Faith Hell
and Heaven The Christian Idea of Immortality Nature and Supemature The Alternative
of the Supematurally Awakened Soul Our Lord's Momentous Teaching Asceticism and
Mysticism The Need of Catholicism To-day The Necessity of the Church The Purification
of Scientific Discipline Suffering and God.

5"! know of no other modem English religious utiter who so persuasively
displays the temper one must describe as Catholic. Of this ideal
Catholicism we may say that, if ever it were to become actual, the road
would be straight and smooth towards the reunion in a universal church
of all men' who in their different ways acknowledge the uniqueness and
eternal significance of Christ." JOHN MEDDLETON MURRY.

BOOKS by EVELYN UNDERBILL

*

THE MYSTIC WAY

Cheaper Edition. Medium 8vo. 10s. 6d. net

The object of this book is to trace out that life which is called
"mystical" from its earliest appearance within Christianity.

THE ESSENTIALS OF MYSTICISM

Crown 8vo. 8s. 6d. net

This book deals with the essential characteristics, practice, and
theory of its absorbing subject. In the second part the lives and
teachings of various mystics are considered in detail.

PRACTICAL MYSTICISM

Third Edition. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net

A "little book for normal people" addressed to those who, repelled
by the length and difficulty of the more elaborate works in mys-
ticism, would yet like to know what it is, and what it has to offer.

JACOPONE DA TODI

Cheaper Edition. Medium 8vo. 10s. 6d. net

A spiritual biography of the thirteenth-century poet and mystic,
together with a selection from his spiritual songs 'translated from
the Italian into English verse by Mrs. Theodore Beck.

IMMANENCE: A BOOK OF VERSES

Fifth Edition. Square Crown 8vo. 4s. 6d. net

THEOPHANES: A BOOK OF VERSES

Second Edition. Square Crown 8vo. 4s. 6d. net

THE VISION OF GOD

by NICHOLAS OF CUSA
Translated by Emma Qurney SaZter. Small Crown 8vo. 5s. net

The Vision of God is the work of a Christian mystic of the fifteenth
century : a rich and powerful personality, scholar and philosopher,
churchman and reformer, and above all an expounder of Mys-
tical Theology. Miss Salter has preceded her translation from the
Latin by a biographical sketch of Nicholas; and the book is prefaced
by a clear and searching Introduction by Miss Evelyn Underbill.

PUBLISHERS: J. M. DENT & SONS LTD.
ALDINE HOUSE: BEDFORD STREET: LONDON: W.C.2

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21 319 386

HtfcEL

Letters from Baron
Frederick von Hugel to

BX Hugel

4705 ^Letters from Baron Iriedrich von

.H85 Hugel to a niece.

ASS

SWIFT I IDA